This Thing Called Theory

Abstract

This introduction to the ‘This Thing Called Theory’ issue of the journal, written by editors Doreen Bernath and Braden Engel, frames current discourses on architectural theory in three categories: “theory as apparatus,” “theory as transaction,” and “theory as craft.” It also briefly summarizes each of the essays included in the issue.

Keywords:

• architecture
• theory
• apparatus
• transaction
• craft

Acknowledgements

The content of this special issue of Architecture and Culture germinated at the 12th AHRA International Conference “This Thing Called Theory,” which took place at Leeds School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University, November 19–21, 2015. As part of the conference organization committee and now guest editors of the journal, we express our special gratitude to the initiator, leader, and mentor of the conference organization, Professor Teresa Stoppani, fellow organizers George Themistokleous and Giorgio Ponzo, as well as the generous support of the AHRA steering group and advisory board.

Notes

¹ The intention to critically examine and to counter the so-called ‘post-theory’ era in architecture was established initially in the agenda for the conference through its call for papers statement and the synopsis. The following are what we considered a few significant references that captured many more voices on this matter within and outside of the field of architecture: Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, "Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta, 33 (2002), 72-77; Michael Speaks, “After Theory,” Architectural Record 193, no.6 (June 2005), 72-75; in the same issue of Perspecta 38, Architecture After All (2006), one finds Michael Speaks’ “Intelligence after Theory,” 101-106, countered by Ashley Schafer’s “Theory after (After-Theory),” 107-124. A more recent summary on this matter can be found in Hélène Frichot, "On the Death of Architectural Theory and Other Spectres,” Design Principles and Practices 3, no. 2 (May, 2009), 113-122. Another influential voice from the cultural and literary theory front is Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (London: Penguin, 2004).

² Colin Rowe, “Englishman Likes Texas ‘Cause You Can See It’” [interview], The Daily Texan (May 11, 1954).

³ Robin Evans, The Projective Cast, Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 359.

⁴ It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather, the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory. The artificial reality, which participants describe in terms of an objective entity, has in fact been constructed by the use of inscription devices”; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts [1979] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 64.

⁵ “The parergon inscribes something extra, exterior to the specific field, but whose transcendent exteriority touches, plays with, brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit and intervenes internally only insofar as the inside is missing. Missing something and is itself missing […] requires a supplementary ‘by-work.’ Certainly the adjunct is a threat. Its function is critical. It entails a risk and enjoys itself at the expense of transforming the theory”; Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October, 9 (1979), 21.

⁶ “What then will be the status of this ‘know-how’ without a discourse, essentially without writing? It is composed of multiple but untamed operatives. This proliferation does not obey the law of discourse, but rather that of production, the ultimate value of physiocratic and later capitalist economics […] a gigantic effort is made to colonise this immense research of ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’ which, although they cannot yet be articulated in a science, can already be introduced into language through a ‘Description’ and, in consequence, brought to a greater ‘perfection’”; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 65.

⁷ In addition to this special issue of Architecture and Culture, see Teresa Stoppani, George Themistokleous, and Giorgio Ponzo, eds., This Thing Called Theory (London: Routledge, 2017), which contains a further selection of papers presented at the AHRA conference.