Lexicon Lost: The Struggle of Architectural Expression
It can be argued that organized language is the major indication of civilized humanity, and therefore shapes the modern human experience more than any other force. Communication of ideas, identification of objects, and connection (or contrast) of experiences has been the evolutionary foundation of human success—architecture, and most especially the modern city, are intrinsically aware of this argument of language as levity.
Meaning holds power, and every architectural element, from macro-form to micro-detail, contributes in part to the larger architectural discourse of proper vocabulary, insider jargon, and most recently, deprecating meme. (1)
An explicitly architectural lexicon organizes as much as segregates, highlighting the duality of dialect and distinction. The 2016 film Arrival delves deeply into the power of language as a universal connector—a sort of linguistic panacea to cultural empathy and the language barrier. “Language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict,” the film states, and it stands to reason. (2) The age of information has brought with it the dawn of mass misinformation, where internet connection fosters the rapid and instant spread of a weaponized language often connected to political, ecological, and architectural agendas. (3)
In Understanding the City, John Eade and Christopher Mele state that “The theoretical acknowledgment of the importance of signification and of the indeterminacy of the social to urban studies has, if anything, heightened the need for careful empirical work that produces situated knowledges (as opposed to static models or all-encompassing theories) about the city.” (4) Eade and Mele list a specific recipe for studying urbanism and the city at large, illustrating a set of specific approaches aimed at respectfully and deftly unpacking the complexities that a city contains. The text itself argues for a just cause, yet its language can simultaneously be seen as undermining its message—the sesquipedalian nature of its vocabulary, with “sesquipedalian” itself acting as its own example, moves from page to page with an air of architectural elitism. Although its title is aimed to clarify the reader’s comprehension of the complicated city, the pages following it only provide glimpses of clarity in a sea of long-winded passages that are architecturally isolated.
This brings an important question of accessibility, approach, and authorship to the forefront of the existing architectural argument and manuscript as we know it: is the architectural discourse, in terms of how we express ourselves and discuss issues in jargon and profession-specific vernacular, educationally progressive or elitist? Is it possible to make an architectural argument with both?
Jane Wolff’s “Lexicon as Theory: Definitions at the Edge of San Francisco Bay” illustrates similar questions with an accessible fluidity unseen in Understanding the City, and distills many challenging architectural points into a concentrated set of memorable examples and solutions. Wolff brilliantly uses her own language as a vessel for illustrating her main argument: if we expand our tasks “from designing sights to designing conversations,” (5) we can, in her eyes, transcend individual sites and issues with an architectural agency yet unseen. The question remains unanswered, however: is architectural terminology designed to be understood, or is it too often inclined to separate others? Furthermore, if our jargon wasn’t solely for the architect to learn and understand, could architecture be more accessible? What would that look like?
We must first understand the tangled contemporary conditions within the city and its architecture, and use the architect’s wide range of tools to represent, hybridize, and concentrate broad topics and confusing swathes of structure in order to share with cultures and practices beyond our own. This, Wolff hypothesizes, goes beyond the physical associations of architecture, and gives the profession “the chance to help build a culture that speaks the language of its landscape.”
Since 1968, Michael Hays argues in “Architecture Theory Since 1968,” architecture theory has transitioned to architecture culture. (6) New university students are regularly told on arrival that they will be part of a “studio culture,” with late nights, aloof professors, and a constantly changing cultural production to formulate alongside their model production. This, argues Lori Brown & Joseph Godlewski, only perpetuates the mysticism of an architecture education, and eventual career, to the vocations around it. (7)
Brown and Godlewski hypothesize ways to drag the profession into the twenty-first century from the ground-up, acknowledging Reynar Banham’s warning of the profession’s “corrosive trend toward insulating itself from discussions outside of the discipline.” Hayes elaborates further, marveling at the metamorphosis of culture as something that one now “both belongs to and possesses,” acting as “a boundary between legitimacy and disestablishment” that is unable to arise instinctively or escape from endless cycles of destruction. This structure of isolation and the architectural insider mirrors the inclination of the profession to over-postulate at risk of losing exposure and general understanding. This is not to argue for an oversimplification of architectural issues, but a recognition of exclusive elitism when it arises and the persistent introduction of new interventions to prevent it.
Lexicon creates room for debate even at the scale of the single definition. Rosalind Krauss, in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” examines the definition of sculpture through the lens of post-modernism, concluding that “clearly, since this is a matter of history, it is also important to explore a deeper set of questions which pertain to something more than mapping and involve instead the problem of explanation.” (8) If we are unable to explain dire issues, and consequently propose their revolutionary solutions, our profession is locked in a state of fissured communication in need of structural transformation in the ways we communicate ideas. With urban creep outpacing all other land use categories in the United States alone, (9) the question of a lexicon lost in the streets of the modern city is more imperative than ever.
1 https://www.instagram.com/oh.em.ayy/?hl=en
3 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-exactly-has-really-had-influence/
4 Spiro Kostof. Excerpts from The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. London: Bullfinch Press. 1991.
5 Jane Wolff, “Lexicon as Theory: Definitions at the Edge of San Francisco Bay.” Delta Dialogues. 2017.
6 K. Michael Hays. “Introduction.” Architecture Theory Since 1968. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1998. p10- 15
8 Rosalind Krauss. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8, 30-44, Spring, 1979.
9 Dave Merrill, Lauren Leatherby. “Here’s How America Uses Its Land.” https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ Bloomburg. July 31, 2018.Web.