The Future or the Eclipse of Criticism

Martedì 4 aprile, alle ore 14.00, presso l'Aula Pacinotti, avrà luogo il simposio  "The Future or the Eclipse of Criticism", organizzato dal Polit(t)ico Research Lab, centro di ricerca dell'Università di Pisa che si occupa di teoria dell'architettura, epistemologia e arte.

L'evento è connesso a una serie di lectures in programma al MAXXI di Roma nel marzo-aprile 2023.

Per partecipare è necessaria la registrazione. Partecipa all'evento online

Intro

Over the last ten years, architectural criticism has suffered a tremendous setback. Before this occurred, professional critics read works of architecture as complex knowledge systems and their job was to dissect and psychoanalyze these works in order to understand their constitutive and compositional logics, within the political, social and economic forces that influenced them. In addition, critics served to guide and orient, to spread architectural culture, and identify emerging trends. These roles are now lost. Marginalized as a subjective – and thus dangerous – practice, criticism today has been almost entirely replaced by scientific analysis, as a certain documentary interest continues to solidify, a kind of archive fever, in the words of Derrida, or, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “a new objectivity that has created a vogue for reportage.” The result is a concentration of the interests of researchers on everything that occurs a latere of the work, as well as an anecdotal curiosity for microhistories and narratives regarding the project. What’s more, due to an excessively dogmatic interpretation of the thought of Manfredo Tafuri, the attention of historians has been relocated from reading the work, understood as a finished product, to its backstage, i.e., its processes of formation, production and construction.

The result is the nearly total disappearance of professional criticism or its refusal to accept the role of intellectual orientation and guidance that, for better or worse, historians and critics once played. Today the twilight of criticism, which has succumbed to history, as Tafuri did in the 60s, has produced architects who are forced to be both promoters and critics of themselves, according to Rem Koolhaas’ model, and curators who have assumed not only the role of new critics but even that of authors as well. 
The aim of this symposium is to investigate emerging themes, identifying those figures, exhibitions, editorial projects and paradigmatic constructions that support, or that have driven, particular critical approaches. But before asking ourselves about the future of criticism, we must ask if and how it might once again have a role in our society.

Programma

Intro
Lina Malfona, Università di Pisa

Panel 1
Paper 1-20 min- Mario Carpo, UCL Bartlett (to be confirmed)
Paper 1-20 min- Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester
30-min discussion Lorenzo Ciccarelli, Università di Firenze

30-min break

Panel 2
Paper 3-20 min- Alessandra Ponte, Université de Montréal
Paper 4-20 min- Douglas Spencer, Iowa State University
30-min discussion Lina Malfona, Università di Pisa

30-min break

Panel 3
Paper 5-20 min- Robert Somol, University of Illinois Chicago
Paper 6-20 min- Cynthia Davidson, Log Journal
30-min discussion Joseph Bedford, University of Virginia

30-min break

Final Discussion
Respondent1- Stan Allen 30-min
Respondent2- Nicolas Bourriaud 30-min

[Immagine: Luigi Ghirri Salsomaggiore 1983-85 ©Eredi di Luigi Ghirri]