Response to "Why Don't We Read About Architecture"

Why Don't We Read About Architecture? is an interesting article that speaks largely to many of the aspects I wish to address within my dissertation.  Author Allison Arieff begins the article by pointing out our role as users of architecture.  As users of architecture our role is not often included amongst the current architectural, design, or construction process.  Currently buildings are designed by architects, or others in construction fields (developers, engineers, designers, etc) in combination with a client.  In other entries I have spoken to the complications that not including users in this process has created, for example with the Mansueto Library. 

Instead of including user functionality, as Arieff later mentions it should, architecture is currently understood primarily in an economic context.  As Arieff explains, "architecture is conveyed as little more than something that costs a lot and causes a lot of grief, rather than something with the potential to enhance our daily lives."  I believe this can be traced back to the fact that architecture is currently defined by education as little more than an art as opposed to being something that can affect social changes and, as she mentions, enhance our daily lives in more than just its design.  Currently architecture seems to be attempting to fight its premise.  With the definition of architecture that the current education system embraces, architecture is not much different from other forms of art that, according to Arieff, "need only please or provoke its audience."  What the current architectural education system should do is embrace the fact that architecture must include user functionality and other business aspects like LEED certification to be valuable.

Arieff points out that another way to make architecture more valuable is by returning to "Bold, opinionated, thoughtful words" with strong architectural critics who act "not just as writers but as advocates."  This is as opposed to the way architecture is currently spoken about, which is almost completely unintelligible, noting that "Indecipherability signifies superior intelligence".  As a recent graduate of the University of Chicago I, like the author, can attest to this fact.  At the University of Chicago I was often surrounded by individuals speaking in what often seemed to me to be indecipherable ways.  Many of these individuals didn't understand the necessity to "dumb down their speech" as this was "condescending" to those they spoke to.  As a friend mentioned recently there are two problems with this kind of language.  The first is that it can often be entirely indecipherable even to the author, looking back on such writing years later.  The second is that when decipherable, the language is often so full of jargon that only others in the same field can understand what is being said.  This makes the writing, or speech, often only understood by a very small audience.  In order to diversify and allow for these, often brilliant ideas, to be expressed to a larger audience the University of Chicago has a very well-known class entitled the Little Red Schoolhouse.  This is a course in which individuals are taught how to write.  It does not, however, teach individuals how to use better grammar.  Instead the course teaches one how to write with a specific audience in mind.  This includes taking emphasis off nouns, which Arieff points out as "hallmarks of a pretentious ass" and on to stronger verbs.  For example, the piece which Arieff points out as difficult to understand has no verb "ANALYSIS: a territorial and social fragmentation, a typical “no-man’s land” undergoing the urban exodus, the settlement of the old and inactive persons, the absence of public place in the body scale substituted by the car."