Kipnis Lecture Summary

I summarized the Kipnis lecture from last year today (for other reasons) and found the summary somewhat helpful in terms of refreshing a particular view on contemporary architecture, and on politics, criticism and the question of criticality in particular. I liked it better now than when I first heard it.

Here's the lecture:
http://sorcerer.design.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/f2006/JKipnis.mov

Here's the summary:

"Overall, as I understood it, the lecture was Jeff's attempt to begin developing a set of criteria that could help him to discriminate between different contemporary architectures/problems. The provocative comparisons that he wants to get at would be Diller vs. Leeser vs. FOA, Seattle Lib vs. Co-op Himmelblau in Dresden, or Rem as single surface (Porto vs. Jusieu vs. Seattle).

He goes about this agenda first by arguing that he thinks the time of possibility for an abstract idea being instantiated as a concept within an architecture (as one of potentially many disciplinary instantiations of that abstraction) is over, and instead one should move on to affect as a source of criticality (he argues that he wants architecture to continue being instrumentally subversive towards its relationship with power). Moving from an idea like "democracy" to an affect like "freedom." Going from "strategy" to "tactics." He says: each discipline produces a body of effects that shape the way we relate to the world and one another, the politics of the world.

He proposes that critics read and discuss and study affect through architecture's details, which according to him are how architecture takes up the problem of affect in relation to its own forms of expertise. He then goes through a case study of the detail of the floorplate (and/or ceiling slab) and its relation to the groundplane, drawing distinctions between (1) conceptual projects (Corb Savoye, floating, turns 'land' to 'ground', depoliticizes, one of many datums) (2) performative projects (Mies Gallerie, two identical planes, staging artificial performances, replaces a datum with a metropolitan field, highly artifactual stages) (3) new authenticity projects (Wright Prairie, connection to ground as land, reemergence of a past political ground).

He focuses on the details of surface in general, and in particular the single surface problem (in many incarnations, with different levels of abstraction). I think for him Rem would become performative (though he stops before really saying these, I think), and Herzog maybe new authenticity, and maybe Diller would be conceptual. In any case, at its core, the argument seems like it has an interest in returning critical attention to the detail as the source of a projects' ability to be evaluated with regard to its appropriate relatives, and considered a success or failure."

Plus the ultra-concise summary, very effective-and-related-to-my-thesis-machinations:

-Disciplinary specificity: each discipline produces a body of effects that shape the way we relate to the world and one another, the politics of the world - modernism: an effort to install a new politics through an architecture of revolution, through a strategic move - related to a democratic idea of politics - when that failed, abandon the idea of strategies - take up tactics to resist Bataille's attack that architecture is always a friend of power - continue to be subversive - how do you participate with power, enjoy your relationship to it but at the same time undermine it - critique is now one of a number of ways to do this - and affect (replacing ideas and concepts) is another way - affect through details, details architecture's unique sphere - relation to the ground as the fundamental question propagating questions of detailing - performative as the most interesting type of ground - artifice as necessary for performance - wham.