Architectural texts: On writing about buildings.

Thomas Oommen
Architect, urbanist
I read an article written by a well-meaning architect about architectural writing.
Some of the arguments went like this: Writing is another valid form of
representation for the architect beyond drawings. It must talk about all the complex
mute layers of architecture, site, context, climate, program and constraints as
opposed to mere aesthetics which are fairly clear in photographs. The other aim of
writing it seems is to communicate to those who havent been in that space. A kind
of stand in for the actual. I suppose all this is partly true in some clichd sense,
but you dont need a critic for any of the above. Just get your average
copywriter/journalist from stardust or filmfare or as is the norm the clueless third
year intern in your office who has the best vocabulary.
Now I do not know what he meant by mere aesthetics in his reasoning lets
assume it means visible form & space the sensible. ( By the way for those who
dismiss aesthetics I would point you towards the work of Jacque Ranciere, TJ Clark
and Frederic Jameson along with Colin Rowe, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, Jeff Kipnis
and Pier Vittorio Aureli. Also forthcoming co-authored article by yours truly)
Ive hardly seen mere form or space analyzed with either insight or precision in
any Indian architectural magazine or book till date. Gautam Bhatia mostly misses it
in his moralizing about Baker, Mehrotra is too busy making grand narratives. The
best Ive read is still the young Charles Correas AD article of 1962 titled, Report
from Chandigarh in which he reads with a precision and insight that seems
prophetic of his skills to create equally engaging environments. If you want to catch
a glimpse of how to look at form and space, read both synchronically and
diachronically within the oeuvre of the architect herself and his generation, situated
in a specific context fish that article out. Note, how in the text he not only refers to
the plans and sections but is critically dependent on them to read form and space.
Form (and space) is not outside essence/content/program. Form is it. Its all you
have. The job of the critic is to forge this link between the mind and the eye. I will
come to this theme later.
For a moment let me go back to the word that Ive repeatedly used. Insight. I have
little use for a critic attempting to with the use of words, represent , stand in or fill
the narrative gap that the graphics leave. Im not looking for 5 different adjectives
to describe light falling on a brick wall. Spare me. What I want is the building to be
critically read through the eyes of an architect who gives me a new framework of
interpreting what appears however counter intuitive it may seem. The job of the
architectural critic is to make the invisible, visible or in Frederic Jamesons word
reveal the unconscious within the work. To gesture to the other ways of seeing
and feeling. This is precisely the reason why the teleology of the architectural text
is not some happy concurrence with the built reality but an other, parallel reality.

How does one do that? The critic must offer a new pair of eyes to look at the work.
To cannibalize from Eisenman, the critics insight forces a new seeing that moves
from the mind to the eye. This is important because if one is an architect, one
realizes there is no causal, original or necessary ur-logic that connects the eye to
the mind(Visions Unfolding, Peter Eisenman). What exists are historically contingent
conventions and associations. Along with art, architecture is a critique of those
associations.
Therefore the critic helps us overcome the normative connections assumed between
seeing and thinking. Architecture or any sign systems have no transcendental
truths. For example, it is a prolonged work of criticism, that led us to see the
exposed brick or any other material is moral/honest/truthful ( Bauhaus via Morris
via Ruskin via Pugin). The myth of these transcendental truths wrapped up as
essence, existence, substance, subject, transcendentality, consciousness, God,
Man, Truth and so on is what Derrida refers to as the metaphysics of presence.
So Perhaps the purpose of the critics text is to displace/supplement/transform these
frameworks, fully cognizant of the fact that the history of metaphysics and the
destruction of metaphysics are a vicious cycle. That is, there is no language no
lexicon no syntax ..we cannot pronounce a single destructive proposition which
has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, the implicit postulations or
precisely what it seeks to contest. Yet the critic has to carry on and this is why the
work of criticism even on a single building written about for a 100 years is never
complete.
This is also the reason why the critic does more than faithfully translate the original
intentions of the architect, if at all he does it. The job of the critic is not to measure
the gap between intention and translation, it is to advance the discipline by offering
new frameworks of thinking and seeing. That framework has to always be critical
whether its theoretical roots are in art, history, politics or social sciences. This is
why most Indian writing in architecture evidenced in the 17 architectural
magazines of Kerala and the self published monographs of architects crammed with
adjective filled prose written by their most faithful employees are third rate
attempts at a poorly grasped phenomenological thinking in architecture. Even if a
critic were to traverse that unfortunate route, it would be a sad contradiction of
phenomenological thought, to attempt to convert/translate the singularity of
sensorial experience into the textual experience. Again, a la Barthes or Derrida in
their distinct ways would argue that such a text is bound to not only produce an
unbridgeable schism, a difference, but that this schism misinterpreted, played
around in multiple ways is the best bet of pushing the boundaries that confine our
ways of thinking and seeing. If this is the case, it seems futile if not unnecessary to
tell some truthful story of origin.
I cant put it any better than Derrida who outlines two interpretations of
interpretation, of structure sign and play
The first interpretation seeks to decipher dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin
which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of

interpretation as an exile. The other which is no longer turned towards [some idea
of true] origin affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name
of man being the name of that being who.throughout his entire history has
dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of play
And it is this creative play we look for from a critic.