Cynthia Davidson, "The Care and Feeding of Criticism"
Wednesday, February 12
06:30pm - 08:00pm
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public
Cynthia Davidson is an architecture editor and critic based in New York City. She is the founding editor of Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City, a tri-annual journal begun in 2003, and editor of the Writing Architecture Series books published by MIT Press. The books and Log are projects of the Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit, architecture think tank she has directed since 1991. She was the founding editor of the architecture tabloid magazine ANY (1993–2000) and of the “Any” book series, which documented ten international architecture conferences that she organized in the 1990s on the cultural condition of architecture at the end of the 20th century. Previously she was editor of Inland Architect magazine in Chicago. Ms. Davidson has also written for a number of periodicals, including Architectural Record and Artforum in New York and Arquitectura Viva in Madrid. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard in 1988–89.
Symposium: "What Criticism?"
Friday, February 14
09:30am - 06:00pm
Stubbins (Room 112), Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public
The title of this series intends to confront the idea of just one way of practicing or understanding criticism nowadays, as well as to shamelessly suggest a refuting of its supposed pure existence. As Foucault pointed out already in 1978, critique is by nature “condemned to dispersion, dependency and pure heteronomy,” and its contemporary forms emphasize those conditions in many aspects that urge for conscious reflections and a renewed vocabulary.
As we know, critique was originally born in the century of systematization, legitimatization and organization of facts of the modern times. It offered a mode of thought to relate rationally to its present, making philosophy and the critical attitude the abstract construct of the also modern being. This attitude was meant to work as the alert, the B-side of a political and social order, its denunciative Other that exposed a determined kind of relationship to what exists.
We might say that at this point of history, that reductive and dialectic method has been proven to have failed and become obsolete. The extreme changes of communication that took place during the last decades and the ones we cannot yet predict, the shift from continuity to iteration, our devices, and the entire set of things and skills that define our existence, all necessarily challenge us with questions about mostly every preset concept. At the same time, as we know, these new platforms amplified audiences and multiplied voices, putting criticism’s roles and actions into discussion again, live and globally.
Dispersion and dissolution are not at all equivalent to disappearance or the cease of existence, but on the contrary; they imply a spilling, dissemination, and distribution.
This conceptual sprawl, this revolution from a contained discourse towards a collective formation, poses new questions such as: How to embrace this new properties and opportunities without losing significance? Do we need to achieve some constitutions to give sense to this intellectual practice? What are its new possible forms? Where does the difference between simple dissemination and the active distribution and commitment to the transformation of our environment rely? Are there that many forms of criticism? Can we think critically about architecture and cities without the aim for sense and virtue? Does criticism need to be useful?
9:30
Presentation and keynotes
Florencia Rodríguez
10:00-11:30
The Impossible Friendship
Participants: Felicity Scott, Iker Gil, Jiminez Lai
Moderator: TBD
11:30-1:00
Forms of the Uncertain
Participants: Uriel Fogué, Andres Lepik, Michael Kubo, Inga Saffron
Moderator: TBD
1:00-2:00
Lunch
2:30-4:00
Criticism = Love
Participants: Troy Payne, Urtzi Grau, Ciro Najle
Moderator: Alexandra Lange
4:00-5:30
Dissemination vs Cultivation
Participants: Meredith Tenhoor, Anthony Acciavatti, Michael Abrahamson
Moderator: TBD
5:30
Closing Remarks
Florencia Rodríguez
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