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Abstract
In order to consider how to negotiate the publication space of interdisciplinary research in architecture in academic journals, this essay reflects on the current forms of writing in architectural discourse, the history of a “critique militante” architectural (peer) review process within the academy, and the future possibilities of a feminist oriented process that seeks to accommodate otherness. These reflections emerge from our experience as academics and as women editors of the interdisciplinary, multimedia journal, Architecture and Culture, first published in 2013. The essay argues that peer review for interdisciplinary research in architecture needs to be re-negotiated as publishing tolerance through a contingency approach to evaluation. We conclude that academic architectural journal publishing can flourish through broader conversational modes of open, non-hierarchical knowledge exchange and editorial practice where published work undergoes a process of becoming.
Notes
Notes
1 Jane Jacobs, Ada-Louise Huxable and Reyner Banham, for instance, used their positions as “outsider” critics to contest the discipline’s discourse as a secret “black box”; Reyner Banham, “A Black Box, The Secret Profession of Architecture,” in A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), 292–9.
2 The authors are both steering group members of the international, interdisciplinary humanities research network, Architectural History Research Association (AHRA) based in the UK. As an Executive Committee member of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), 2003–05, Troiani was involved in reformatting its journal, Fabrications. After moving to the UK, she joined the AHRA in 2006. Ewing joined AHRA in 2008. From 2009 to 2012, Troiani was chair of the organization and in that role initiated the formation of Architecture and Culture for which both authors are editors. Through the AHRA and their own interdisciplinary research practice, the authors understand that some academics in architectural history and theory today want to use their designed skills to work in alternative creative writing and graphic ways to produce publications that employ design and personal artistic expression.
3 Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, “Gender and Anonymous Peer Review,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2018), 132–137.
4 Genevieve Baudoin, “A Matter of Tolerance,” The Plan Journal (2016), available online: http://www.theplanjournal.com/article/matter-tolerance (accessed February 2, 2019).
5 Justine Clark and Paul Walker, “Negotiating the Intention of the Work,” Volume, 36 [special issue “Ways to Be Critical”] (2013): 24–29.
6 Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, “New Architectural Criticism: How to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff,” in Proceedings for The European Academy of Design (EAD 11) Conference, Paris Descartes University, Paris, and College of Arts, Paris & Boulogne sur Seine, France, 22–24 April 2015.
7 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, ed. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972), 47–49.
8 Ibid., 25.
9 For instance terminologies related to the different roles practice(s) can take in Art and Design research are explored in K. Niedderer and S. Roworth-Stokes (2007), 4–9.
10 Kaji-O’Grady, “Gender and Anonymous Peer Review.”
11 Joseph Rykwert, “Does Architecture Criticism Matter?,” Domus 979 (April 2014): 4.
12 Peter Collins, Architectural Judgement. (London: Faber & Faber, 1971).
13 Naomi Stead, “Three Complaints about Architectural Criticism,” Architecture Australia 92, no. 6 (2003): 50.
14 Peter Collins, “The Interrelated Roles of History, Theory, and Criticism in the Process of Architectural Design,” The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture (1965): 6.
15 William H. Hayes, “Architectural Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 4 (2002): 325.
16 Ibid.
17 Stead, “Three Complaints about Architectural Criticism,” 52.
18 James Elkins and Matthew Engelke, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 8.
19 Stead, “Three Complaints about Architectural Criticism,” 50.
20 Momen El-Husseiny, review of “The Crit: An Architecture Student’s Handbook – Rosie Parnell and Rachel Sara,” Journal of Architectural Education 62, no. 3 (2009): 91.
21 Rykwert, “Does Architecture Criticism Matter?,” 4.
22 Stead, “Three Complaints about Architectural Criticism,” 50.
23 See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tough%20love (accessed February 2, 2019).
24 Stead, “Three Complaints about Architectural Criticism,” 50.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Benjamin Forgey, “White, Male, Old,” Arkkitehti 100, no. 3 (2003): 95.
28 Vanessa Quirk, “The Architect Critic is Dead (Just Not for the Reason You Think),” Archdaily (April 2012), available online: https://www.archdaily.com/223714/the-architect-critic-is-dead-just-not-for-the-reason-you-think/.
29 Julia Kristeva, “Institutional Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice: An Interview,” in De-, Dis-, Ex, Volume Two: The Anxiety of Interdsiciplinarity, ed. Alex Coles and Alexia Defert (London: Black Dog, 1997), 6.
30 Richard Coyne, “Even More than Architecture,” in Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, ed. Murray Fraser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 201.
31 Glenn Ellison, “Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing: A q r Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 5 (2002): 994–1034.
32 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2012).
33 Clark and Walker, “Negotiating the Intention of the Work.”
34 Hayes, “Architectural Criticism,” 329.
35 Reyner Banham, “Convenient Benches and Handy Hooks: Functional Considerations in the Criticism of the Art of Architecture,” The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture (1964): 103.
36 James G. Daichendt, Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research (Bristol: Intellect, 2011).
37 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image. trans. G. Elliot (London: Verso, 2007).
38 G. Mecchia, “The Future of the Image” [Review], Symplokē 16, nos. 1–2 (2008): 313–316.
39 Rancière, Future of the Image, 3.
40 Ibid., 8.
41 Ibid., 11.
42 David Wild, “OP Arch,” Journal of Architectural Education 62, no. 3 (2009): 2–32, 94.
43 Niedderer and Roworth-Stokes, “The Role and Use of Creative Practice in Research and its Contribution to Knowledge” (paper presented at the IASDR International Conference, 2007).
44 J. J. Charlesworth, “Features: The Dysfunction of Criticism,” Art Monthly (Archive: 1976–2005), no. 269 (2003): 1.
45 Elizabeth Wager, Fiona Godlee and Tom Jefferson. How to Survive Peer Review (London: BMJ Books, 2002), 15.
46 Colomina, cited in Beatriz Colomina, Gabriele Mastrigli, Matthew Stadler and Kestrel Rattenbury, “4 Statements,” Volume no. 1 (2005): 75.
47 Kaji-O’Grady, “Gender and Anonymous Peer Review,” 133.
48 These criteria were used in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.
49 Rykwert, “Does Architecture Criticism Matter?”
50 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 151.
51 Ellison, “Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing,” 995.
52 Wager et al., How to Survive Peer Review, 28; Ellison, “Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing ,” 995.
53 Wager et al., How to Survive Peer Review, 12.
54 Ellison, “Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing;” Wager et al., How to Survive Peer Review; Suzanne Ewing, Jeremie M. McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria C. Bernie, eds., “Field/Work and Site,” in Architecture and Field/Work (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010); Coyne, “Even More than Architecture.”
55 Kaji-O’Grady, “Gender and Anonymous Peer Review.”
56 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 196.
57 Igea Troiani, “Academic Capitalism in Architecture Schools: A Feminist Critique of Employability, 24/7 Work and Entrepreneurship,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017), 170–180.
58 Research Excellence Framework, Panel Criteria and Working Methods REF01.2012 (2012), 64 “Output Types”; 5700 submissions were double-weighted.
59 Barbara H. Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 36.
60 Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, “Inside Architecture from the Outside: Architecture’s Disciplinary Practices,” Architecture and Culture 2, no. 2 (2014): 151–166.
61 See http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rfac20 (accessed February 2, 2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Igea Troiani
Igea Troiani (PhD) is an architect, academic and independent filmmaker who has worked in Australia, Germany, the UK and China. She is currently a Professor of Architecture at Xi-an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou. Her portfolio of research is based in three areas: (1) the social production of architecture; (2) architecture, neoliberalism and labor; and (3) architecture and media. In addition to her written publications, she produces theory as film; since 2004, she has made films on the politics of architectural production, most recently under her production company Caryatid Films. She is a founder of Original Field of Architecture (Oxford, UK) with Andrew Dawson, founder and editor-in-chief of Architecture and Culture, co-editor of The Politics of Making (2007) and Transdisciplinary Urbanism and Culture (2017).
Suzanne Ewing
Suzanne Ewing is an architect, academic and educator and was Head of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, 2016–18. She co-founded ZONE architects, UK, in 2002. Underpinning the inquiry of her critical design work in sited architecture projects and the speculative domain of design studios in education, is elucidating and nuancing theories, skills, judgments and potentials embedded in practice-based methodologies, which traverse aesthetics and ethics: knowing how to practice, knowing how to construct a good project. Publications include Architecture and Field/Work (Routledge, 2011), and articles in Journal of Architecture, Architectural Theory Review, NORDIC and Charette. She is co-editor of the international award-winning journal Architecture and Culture.