Manifestos and Manifestations: Dialogues between Ways of Writing and Ways of Building

The intersection of climate change and urban migration represents a dramatic challenge for the discipline, shifting the profile of practice leaders and its systems of criticism, even if not yet transforming academic theory. An ethical theory for this moment of crisis would necessarily engage with this reality, critically examining questions of where to build, what to build with, and who to build for. Yet in education, a divide between technical courses on building—or thinking through making—and theory courses focused on thinking through writing, persists despite the urgent and transdisciplinary nature of ethical issues facing architects today. This paper examines if and how theory could intentionally break this separation of writing and building in the teaching of technology. Contemporary practice has no shortage of prescriptive frameworks for sustainability, wellness, regeneration, resilience, and even social resistance; while theory offers critical perspectives on their intellectual origins. The pressing question for academia is: can a critical theory for building emerge from and empower architects to work confidently within the confines of material practices towards transforming the social and environmental reality of people and the planet? Stan Allen’s Pragmatic Realism provides a still relevant challenge; calling for creative practice to be more secure in its own technical and theoretical foundation and for theory to cultivate differences through a more realistic conceptual basis. This paper presents a pedagogical experiment where architectural manifestos stimulated a dialogue between writing and building. Integrated with a construction-focused design studio, students had to simultaneously write theory that transcends a project to define social and ecological agendas, while extracting generalizable principles for practice from their material investigations. Analyzing the students’ books as evidence, especially the intentional organization of ideas into theoretical frameworks, elucidates opportunities and challenges for integrating Architectural Theory and Design education towards strengthening the critical and ethical foundations of building practices.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.49

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1