Some Notes on Contemporary Authorships in Architecture

In the field of architecture, it is not unusual to use the term direction (Rossi 1995) – whether borrowed from theatre or cinema – to express two ideas that would otherwise seem rather banal outside of metaphor. First, that architecture – and in this sense architectural research is no exception – depends on a vast constellation of disciplinary knowledges and contextual contingencies that are largely beyond the architect’s direct control (Till 2009). And second, that the true specialization of architectural design – regardless of the outcome it pursues – lies in coordinating, managing, and orienting all the different expertise that converge within the project in order to endow it with meaning. Ideas, these, that have been stated countless times and that, over the years – amid the increasing specialization of production processes and, more generally, the growing complexity of the conditions of production – have become ever more evident. So much so that one might reasonably question the need to reiterate, yet again, the multivocal character of architectural design, or to speak of authorship in the plural, as if it were something new rather than self-evident. However, if we consider the term “authorship” in its functional sense (Foucault 1998) and look more closely at contemporary forms of collaborative and shared authorship, it soon becomes clear that there is something new at stake. For today, the conditions under which architectural projects are produced differ radically from those of only twenty years ago. And as always, these conditions shape not only the kind of product to which the project aspires but also the very meaning attached to the word architecture. What follows, then, is not an analysis of the organic evolution of an idea of authorship as part of an internal disciplinary discourse (Borasi 2015). Rather, it is an attempt to highlight the reasons behind its transformation in relation to the changing material modes through which it is produced – whether architecture is understood as a “commodity” for which the architect serves as “provider”, or as a form of critical theory of reality (Biraghi 2019), which, by definition, cannot be independent from that same reality.

An atlas of emerging practices

To understand in which direction things are moving, the most useful tool, usually, is to equip oneself with a map. And even in the field of theory – at least as far as architecture is concerned – maps have historically played a central role in this sense. It is enough to look, for example, at the best-known one in this field, the map drawn by Charles Jencks in 1970, to realize this: six different traditions or future tendencies are represented as a series of wavy blobs on a grid marked by a timeline stretching from 1920 to 2000. And to compare it with another one, produced by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal in 2016, in order to grasp the orientation of the profession after the global economic crisis of 2008 and its political positioning in relation to the contradictions that emerged around what is still referred to as the Architecture of Neoliberalism (Spencer 2016). A proper map, the first, and a “political compass”, the second – as defined by its authors – used to find one’s bearings in two fundamentally different moments from a theoretical, economic, and social point of view. And, moreover, constructed through entirely different methods, even though perfectly consistent with their content. Based on a well-established idea of authorship, the first was produced as the reflection of Jencks’s own autonomous critical interpretation, however widely contested it may later have been. And based on a more open idea, the second was refined through a process of self-assessment submitted to the very subjects being mapped, which led to a reformulation of the categories first hypothesized (Zaera-Polo 2016). Yet what is most striking about them is not the form or the process, but rather the content – or, better, the definition of the categories themselves. Defined in the first case as the projection of an equally autonomous theoretical position of the authors included on the map, and in the second as a reaction to a series of external events to which the participants found themselves responding, whether they wished to or not. A definition that, by contrast, has essentially disappeared from what – though less well known – turns out to be the map best suited to describing the contemporary situation, and which has been replaced by words such as “collaboration”, “participation”, and “network” (Venturini 2019).

More an Atlas of Emerging Practices than a map, this work was assembled by Gianpiero Venturini as the outcome of a statistical study of the state of the profession after 2008, bringing together a series of data points. These include the starting conditions of a market marked by an enormous contraction in private investment – due to a crisis that originated precisely in the real-estate sector – and the simultaneous withdrawal of most public investment, as a result of the austerity policies with which the vast majority of European states responded to that crisis. And thus they also highlight the extremely high number of architects in comparison to the very limited number of commissions, which forced many emerging offices to undertake an independent path whose primary objective was survival in a context with scarce professional opportunities. A path, this, that involved the creation of new organizational forms, the realization of low-cost projects, and the search for alternative funding sources beyond traditional ones – as well as new means of communication and self-promotion made possible by the simultaneous spread of social media¹. And which therefore constituted the true material basis for the rise of a new generation of emerging practices for which the structuring of collaborative and participatory processes has represented the dominant feature of a production. One that has focused primarily on projects of urban reactivation based on new practices of engagement and self-construction, on ephemeral installations in contexts related to art, architecture, and, more generally, public space, and on curatorial operations at various scales, from publishing to public art. And within a framework in which what stand out are the so-called unsolicited projects – those without an initial budget, to be understood as an investment in the possibility of realizing one’s ideas – and those born from the involvement of users, investors, and policymakers through the online dissemination of initiatives designed to trigger a complex decision-making process. Projects, in other words, which are not so much aimed at intercepting a market as at creating one from below, according to a model of diffuse entrepreneurship that has evolved from widespread to openly collaborative.

The post-2008 architect(s)

In summary, what Venturini investigates statistically is an “other way of doing architecture” (Schneider, Awan, and Till 2011), which begins with a form of urban activism organized into multidisciplinary collectives and infiltrates the margins of reality in order to make it more livable, in the absence of a still-functioning welfare state. And which, from a resistant practice – if not outright clandestine – it has become predominant in terms of the production of meaning with respect to the very idea of doing architecture, at least according to the most important occasions for reflection on the subject. It is enough to look, for instance, at the most recent Venice Biennales, which until 2008 had been focused on conceptual innovations, parametric fantasies, or the boom in global metropolitan urbanization. The progression has been evident, beginning with Aaron Betsky’s Architecture Beyond Building, and increasingly rapid after 2016, with the edition curated by Alejandro Aravena. Reporting from the Front, Freespace, How Will We Live Together?, The Laboratory of the Future, Intelligens – the titles alone suffice to show how architecture is no longer identified solely with the built environment, but rather with a spatial practice of social, civic, and political responsibility, expressed through activities of inclusion, system-building, mobilization, identity expression, reorganization, and, above all, care. In a participatory process of programmatic elaboration, consensus-building, and communication design, in which – through a curious semantic shift – this idea of care unfolds spatially as an action of curatorship, although in this case too increasingly distributed and plural. And in which the architect – or rather a group organized under forms that may assume the most varied denominations – is alternately a mediator, a facilitator, a collector of ideas, or a simple service technician: what one might call a municipal architect. An architect whose authorship, at least in the historical sense, fades both horizontally – through participation in a complex network of other practitioners – and vertically – relatively to a whole range of inhabitants and stakeholders, both human and non-human, who express their spatial agency in different ways.

It is therefore also another way of being an architect, understanding by this term the means by which the subject of authorship is identified in relation to a spatial construction and, more narrowly, in relation to its meaning. Thus, the devolution of one’s authorship actually corresponds – at least ideally – to a greater capacity to grasp reality, both analytically and constructively. And although this identity, in recent years, has been refined in parallel with what has developed in the artistic field under the notion of post-production (Bourriaud 2002), it cannot be denied that this change has taken on a recognizable autonomous form only in relation and as a reaction to the transformations of professional reality and to the new conditions of architectural production after 2008. Whether this conception of the profession is in fact largely marginal from the point of view of global building production – as Pier Vittorio Aureli also emphasizes in his reformulation of Jencks’s map, in which he frames the contemporary architect as a precarious wage laborer² – it is entirely irrelevant, since, in terms of cultural dissemination, this model has already become consolidated across every branch of contemporary architectural research. There are now few published projects – except for a small fraction by established masters – that are not the outcome of a multidisciplinary group in which responsibility is shared among professionals, inhabitants, and other stakeholders. And it is nearly impossible to imagine an exhibition on the subject without a curator issuing a call for ideas to collect contributions even before clearly defining its object. Not to mention, in the field of fundamental research, the progressive disappearance of personal monographic works in favor of a proliferation of editorial projects – such as magazines, fanzines, or digital platforms – more open to various stimuli. In a process in which adherence to this principle of collaborative sharing becomes a qualifying factor for any proposal being put forward and, consequently, for the success of a project one intends to complete, regardless of its specific relevance.

The post-authorial contradictions

Now, if what has just been described represents the basic conditions within which a contemporary idea of authorship in the architectural field can be produced – assuming the positive aspects in terms of openness and richness, which are rather self-evident –, it is necessary to highlight the contradictions that these conditions entail, which are primarily political in nature. All tactical practices, in fact, born as resistant forms of design in a period of crisis, have in a very short time become one of the tools most actively promoted at the institutional level to conceal the withdrawal of the public sector from many of the responsibilities it was traditionally meant to carry out. Funding an activity of urban activism, for example, instead of supporting the costs of a complete project, drastically reduces the expenses involved. And the social participation that this activity requires makes greater political consensus on the operation more likely, while simultaneously reducing the attribution of clear responsibility in the event of possible failures (Leveratto 2022). All this to say – as has already been noted (Aureli 2013; Chabard 2018) – that designers who work with a bottom-up notion of care, through their operations of repair, often lend themselves in good faith to an aestheticization of a lack – namely, that of the public sector – which should instead be addressed through different means. They thus become, unknowingly, functional to a neoliberal conception of the public realm which, by virtue of their intervention, acquires a new and unprecedented value in terms of inclusiveness and attractiveness – and which holds true for a square, as mentioned, for a masterplan, or, more simply, for the organization of an exhibition. The devolution of responsibility implied by a shared and collaborative idea of authorship, in other words, concerns primarily the risks and costs of a given operation, not its benefits – or at least this is how it is most often used from a political standpoint. And the indiscriminate adoption of this same logic from a design perspective risks being used to cover yet another lack, this time of a technical nature.

In other words, the refusal on the part of authors to assume final responsibility for the outcomes of a design operation, in favor of a diffuse idea of spatial agency, risks devaluing from the outset the specialist contribution of that operation, whether technical or cultural. This, in turn, risks shifting – and indeed, in most cases it actually shifts – every principle for evaluating its effects from a formal field – determined by the coherence between those effects and their meanings – to a substantive one in which only content serves as a parameter. As though the intention or meaning of a design operation – understood primarily from an ethical standpoint – were the only thing that matters, and the specialist language through which these are realized were entirely irrelevant – if not outright counterproductive in terms of reception and, therefore, social acceptance. If to all this we also add the fact that architecture has been replaced, in terms of spatial production, by an idea of curating programmatic, constructive, and communicative contributions of highly diverse – though rarely specialist – nature, and that the primary medium for architectural discourse is now represented by social media – with the resulting combination of linguistic flattening and aestheticization of content – the picture becomes problematic for at least one reason, one that concerns precisely the political role of the architect. For once the architect’s specialist contribution is considered superfluous – or at least comparable to that of any other actor involved in a given operation – their attempt to reposition themselves as mediator, facilitator, or collector of ideas – when others possess specialist competencies in this respect – within a political and economic framework shaped by the conditions described above, risks resulting in a role closer to that of a volunteering activist, whose social vocation and awareness of acting for a good cause must suffice as compensation for their work, in a manner that ultimately serves the very public withdrawal mentioned earlier.

Conclusions

As mentioned at the outset, what applies to architectural design, in terms of production conditions, naturally applies also to research on or by design. And the effects of the framework described above are already quite visible in this field. Traditional monographic studies of a critical-interpretative nature, aimed at supporting a theoretical argument – often rather aspirational – have been replaced by a series of researches of a quasi-geographical nature, in which the author’s voice fades into the multivocality of the whole. Collections of plural histories, anthologies of forgotten political micrologies, atlases of long-ignored design positions, or situated surveys of exemplary case studies, to name just a few. Each aimed not at interpreting but rather at revealing the fabric of a reality too often hidden beneath the surface, through the voices of its very protagonists, to whom dignity and relevance are restored by means of an unprecedented narrative context. And all united by that expanded conception of the architectural project that spans scales, contributions that are more or less specialized, and material dimensions of the most diverse kinds, identifying itself with that broader dimension of critical spatial practice (Hirsch and Miessen 2012). A fact that, if on the one hand offers undeniable benefits in terms of plurality, inclusion, and, ultimately, the richness of the research activated in this sense, on the other hand presents the same risks determined by the conditions discussed with regard to the design of space itself. The disappearance of a specific specialist language and the proliferation of extra-disciplinary contributions, the flattening of an argument to its mere content, all the mechanisms of information retrieval, dissemination, and communication based on social media – and on the biases embedded in their algorithms – are all phenomena that are already widely perceptible. These phenomena are not problematic in themselves, but only potentially so, in relation to the objective of any scientific research – namely, that of contributing to the creation of original knowledge within a given field – and in relation to the political role of research itself. A role that must always be kept clearly in mind, in order to avoid the risks to which professional practice now seems to have grown accustomed.