Illusions of importance are as persistent as those of progress and reflect back to reinforce notions of truth or goodness or a muddled mix of the two. When you think back on the first time your mom hung a drawing you made on the refrigerator door as a “masterpiece” or you received that long hoped-for acknowledgment from a respected teacher that “you have special talent” or simply are “the best,” it is hard to convince yourself that these events of profound importance in the making of childhood self-identity weren’t literally true and fair evaluations. No matter your age, when the things you make are declared “great” it is hard to accept that the statement might not be literally true and the work, in fact, might not be good.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of praise. Who doesn’t want to hold on to notions of importance once conferred? It is particularly acceptable if the one doling out praise is a parental figure or the receiver of the praise an adolescent. Even as adults, meaning drawn from the judgments of others on things we’ve made contributes to self-esteem and fuels self-actualization through future creative endeavors. There is no reason to denigrate all the useful motivations and bits of identity fueled by pride – individually at least. At the level of an entire discipline, however, things are different. It is evidence of pathology – a delusion worthy of Freud. And this, I believe, is the case with architecture.
Venerating important works of the past, to be clear, is not delusional. Neither is the veneration of the patrons, designers, and builders of those iconic buildings or those who have maintained them. Venerating yourself, believing one to be a warrior for truth and goodness because one practices a profession that others praise, is. If it seems that these comments address only a fringe assortment of ego-maniacal caricatures of architects, the reader is likely an architect suffering the delusion to some extent. A recent treatise attempting to re-orient architecture from its self-indulgence toward helping people, for instance, still uses terms such as “true artworks … architecture’s latent esthetic, ethical, social, and even spiritual powers … genuineness … authenticity … truthfulness … Honesty … the Unmeasurable … integrity … true encounter … based on a truer understanding of human nature.”[i] More than a bit of unexamined self-importance remains. Anecdotally, non-architects seldom have such blinders and frequently note architects’ delusions of grandeur and even suggest they possess this trait at rates exceeding practitioners of other professions.
The issue isn’t simply that architects tend to be egotistical about accomplishments made by the profession as a whole – in itself annoying but hardly world-threatening – but that this delusion converts works of architecture into idols and relics that stand as worldly evidence of architecture’s mission toward truth and justice, and confers upon architects the status of missionaries or disciples, activists or change agents, truth-tellers and would-be Messiahs. Meaning, or at least thinking about meaning, is displaced by this process. Instead of occupying its normal place as a transactional phenomenon between everyday people and artifacts of culture, meaning is re-imagined as embedded in the work of architecture in a complex code for which architects act as decipherers, disseminators or purveyors. Meaning is removed from the public sphere to an academic holy of holies, to use a metaphor not-so-stretched as it might first appear.[ii] In effect, meaning is secluded and doled out by practitioners eager to resist the spectre of meaninglessness not by making meaning easily available to everyone but by making meaning appear as a revelation granted only to those who remain faithful and subservient.
[i] Benedikt, Architecture Beyond Experience, 14, 16, 27-29, 34. This list is hardly all-inclusive. These are just some words and phrases that stood out in Part One, pp. 1-34. Parts Two and Three perpetuate the same and similar language including, “thinking of buildings as beings is fundamentally ethical,” 121.
[ii] Speaking of appropriations of tribes and decaying Southern mansions by anthropologists and novelists, Walker Percy says, “although it is by no means the intention of the expert to expropriate sovereignty – in fact he would not even know what sovereignty meant in this context – the danger of theory and consumption is a seduction and deprivation of the consumer.” Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: how queer man is, how queer language is, and what one has to do with the other, (New York: Picador, 1975), 55.
Architecture is Fiction 