Navigating Narratives

A Conversation with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas,
and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco

September 2024

For the fifth issue of Architecture Writing Workshop, Talking Places, the editors convened a roundtable on the intricacies of narratives and storytelling in architecture, bringing together perspectives from art and design, architectural history, and curatorial practice. 

The myriad stories of those who build, inhabit, and interact with spaces provide a more nuanced understanding of how architecture operates in real life. This perspective challenges the tendency to view architectural narratives through a singular, often detached lens. Through various mediums—from exhibitions and walking tours to oral histories—the conversation that follows offers a path to redefine how we relate to, narrate, and design the built environment.

Editors Sebastián López Cardozo and Lauren Phillips moderated the discussion with Joël León Danis, Athenea Papacostas, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco. (This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.)

Sebastián López Cárdozo (SLC): Why do stories matter?

Despite being a highly effective and often preferred vehicle for transmitting information, the use of narrative in formal and academic writing is often seen as subjective and perhaps not taken as seriously. How do we address these concerns? And is there an opening for personal writing to play a larger role in communicating architectural intent and experience?

Athenea Papacostas (AP): As director of the Museum of National Housing (MUNAVI) in Mexico City, I worked with RIWA Architects to build a narrative about housing that aimed to change how people relate to their home, and place more importance on the decisions they make in their daily lives. The curation process not only considered people’s role as renters or home buyers, but also as members and caretakers of their community.

Welcome section on MUNAVI’s permanent exhibition. Photo by GLR Studio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit. 

I also have an ongoing project that is centered on my own spatial memory of the houses I’ve lived in, the process of leaving one for another, and how this shaped my experience of the city. This project led to an open event with a series of clay models, where I invited the visitors for a conversation. I asked them about the number of times they’ve moved, characteristics of their homes that have stood out, and their memorable experiences. The open dialogue changes the broader narrative about housing; we realize that it isn’t just about the size or location of the home, but also about the people we share the space with. It has social, economic, and emotional components—everything comes together in the domestic space.

Clay models at the performance opening on March 5, 2023 at Laguna, Mexico City. Photo by Laura Orozco.

Joël León Danis (JLD): There's a tendency in the discipline to over-academize how we talk about space—and this creates a barrier to those outside of it to engage in shaping how space is understood and described. Everyone experiences architecture and everyone has their own story to tell, and personal stories are just as valuable as any other stories we tell ourselves about buildings. They can help us reflect how architecture can better support the narratives people want to experience, versus a prescriptive or deterministic architecture that only supports a single interpretation.

With the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), we held a Pride event this year, where thousands of people shared their experiences of queer spaces. Maybe only a handful of these stories had explicitly architectural components—and yet all the stories happened in architecture. The question is, can we use this kind of information to better understand how to design spaces—to encourage positive stories and prevent negative ones?

Attendees share their memories at the Toronto Society of Architects booth at the 2024 Pride StreetFair. Photo by Kurtis Chen.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco (ISO): Oral stories have been fundamental in architectural history to challenge a canon privileging a controlled, hermetic narrative that tends to erase the voices of those who actually inhabit spaces. Dominant histories privileging architectural archives often sidelined the fact that producers of space are not just architects. In the same sense that geographical constraints, policies and legal mandates produce architectures, the construction worker, domestic worker, third-generation inhabitants, draftsmen, and many more bring their own forms of experience to bear on the production of architectural space. 

It’s interesting to compare storytelling and oral histories versus histories that are only based on archival evidence. It raises questions about how that archive was constructed, who owns it, who is tasked with its preservation, and so on. As a historian, I've been working to bring oral accounts into my work to address these concerns, without, however, leaving behind the archives to compliment oral histories—it’s a balance. And, ultimately, it’s important to admit that every story comes with an author and a certain kind of position—inherent subjectivity is not something we can avoid.  

JLD: And what becomes a place’s dominant story can’t necessarily be controlled by those who created the space. A symbol of democracy in one era can become a symbol of a totalitarian regime in the next. 

There is a building in Venezuela from the tail end of the dictatorship (built late 1950s) called El Helicoide. It’s a ramped, helicoidal project that allowed people to drive up to shops. It features a Buckminster Fuller dome at the top and it’s been said that Salvador Dalí offered to adorn its interiors—it was a symbol of prosperous Venezuela. When the dictatorship fell, democracy didn’t want to touch that building.

El Helicoide was never finished, and it remained a shell of a building for about 40 years, hosting a variety of uses. Then along came the country’s current government, and it became the headquarters for the Secret Police, a place where people are incarcerated and tortured. The building has represented different values to different people at different times—so it’s important to contextualize stories we hear about it. The architecture hasn’t changed, and it is still spectacular, but now it is very strange to tell people that you love it, because its current use is so terrible. Its narrative has evolved beyond the control of the architects, who could not have imagined that the little shops they designed would be used to make cells for prisoners.

El Helicoide building in Caracas, Venezuela, designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. Photo by Damián D. Fossi Salas. 

Lauren Phillips (LP): There are many instances of architecture coming up with a solution, dropping it off in a community and assuming that people will figure out how to use and occupy that space in a “successful” way. Particularly when it comes to community-based projects, architects might construct a possibility based on their own imagined narrative. There’s an arrogance in believing that designs speak for themselves. Is there a role for narrative in communicating how spaces are to be used—almost as an architectural users’ manual?

AP: You use the word “manual,” and I love them—even the Ikea ones, they're wonderful. They help us put together our sense of how we can enable things to happen. However, they are also a cold way of communicating, especially when compared to storytelling. Storytelling and verbal communication can be much more impactful in communicating how a space’s use is envisioned. The written word is very important, but it cannot wholly replace conversations and the rapport that develops out of dialogue.

ISO: Any building is an accumulator of stories. It never stops—the plan is always accumulating different lives and different histories, sometimes antagonistic histories. So perhaps the idea of a fixed manual is too prescriptive for the many ways a building’s narrative will evolve over its lifetime. Architects are really good at pretending to design for eternity and to hang on to the illusion that the plan dictates the narrative. But I think there’s a different way of perceiving space—one that involves recentering the voices of those that are actually living in it. 

The architect Enrique Ortiz, speaking of his work with Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City, said the community is his school. That is something incredibly telling and humbling, as it redefines what the architect is—more of a service provider as opposed to a canonical figure that imposes his or her ideas.

Left and Right: A street and and andador (pedestrian road) in Cooperativa Palo Alto, the first cooperative in Mexico City with 221 houses and approximately 1,400 inhabitants. 2022, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco.

Center: The first house built collectively in Cooperativa Palo Alto mid 1970s, Courtesy of Cooperativa Palo Alto.

SLC: When we talk about the process of communicating narrative, how much does the medium matter? We all work with different media, whether we’re talking about essays, exhibitions, oral histories, or architectural design. How do different mediums affect the process of telling a story?

JLD: I don't think the medium of storytelling matters so much as far as how stories are produced, but each medium has a different power of transmitting a story. Architecture is probably one of the worst mediums of communication, in part because it lacks the kind of shared language needed for meaningful engagement. 

When we do walking tours with the TSA, we’re constantly thinking of how to build this shared language—to foster the ability to notice and read the stories embedded in buildings. Because the walking tour is a medium that lends itself well to conversation, it can be especially accessible. 

A big part of the tour guide’s job at the TSA is to help people become comfortable talking about their built environment. Understanding a building’s history and how to access it is key to this. And it doesn’t need to be intimidating— these histories can be easy to understand once you remove some of the jargon that surrounds a lot of architectural talk.

ISO: As a discipline we’ve struggled to mainstream ways of talking about architecture that go beyond aesthetic responses. It is exciting to see that starting to change, and to see storytelling as a vehicle for widening that conversation. But apart from writing, drawing and other forms of visual representation are beautiful ways to tell stories. 

I experienced this while working with Cooperativa Palo Alto, a community that lives in an intergenerational way with a high degree of nuance that is difficult to describe in words. For my own research process, I've been trying to redraw a few of their houses over time. Words can’t always communicate certain parts of the experience—in particular how the experience of a space comes into being. 

AP: The medium also depends on the audience, right? Who do you want to reach? Do you want to reach other architects? Or the people living in Cooperativa Palo Alto? Depending on who you want to reach, you might (or might not) write an essay that is overly long and technical. I also agree very much that we have a plurality of tools and forms of representation. 

It reminded me of an experiment which involved working with my own memory, the houses that I lived in, and the memory of those spaces. After I’d made models out of that process I thought, well, I should also do drawings. While I was doing the drawings, I recorded myself describing them. So I had the voice notes as well as the drawings and models. 

As an extension of the project, I asked my girlfriend to describe the first house she lived in. She closed her eyes and started describing spaces, and I started drawing. Sometimes she described the furniture, other times a detail. When she opened her eyes, she asked: “How can you draw someplace you’ve never been?” 

SLC: As a storyteller, whether you’re writing, speaking, or drawing, it seems the first component in shaping a narrative is to have a firsthand experience that you need or desire to communicate. But the intention behind that act of communication—is it meant to stand in or take the place of a firsthand experience on the part of the audience? Or should it spur them to go and have a firsthand experience of their own?

ISO: That's a very good question, and it's a difficult question. I'm working on another research project right now, related to the struggle for housing rights for elderly sex workers, where I’m trying to situate oral histories. I have struggled with it because, on the one hand, I don't want to speak on behalf of anyone—but on the other hand, I have a strong desire to communicate their histories. So there is a difficulty in trying to bring their voices into the conversation while also keeping my critical distance. 

It sounds perhaps contradictory, but bringing oral accounts involves getting closer to your interlocutors. You don't visit them only one time, but many. You spend time with them that isn’t written about. You’re building a social relationship with them. And that's really where the trust of them sharing their stories comes about. But in that process you get very close to their lives. And then, when it’s time to write (at least in my experience) I felt like I really needed to come back to the paper by distancing myself again. Because it's still important to try to maintain a certain objectivity that also allows for the introduction of counterarguments. 

In the end, there's a position—an argument that I’m trying to construct. With Cooperativa Palo Alto I realized, for example, that there can be counterpositions. At Palo Alto there were two accounts of how that space was produced: one from the people who were living there, and one from the people that had left that space, now called “the dissidents of the cooperative.” I was trying to contextualize the disagreement as well as look through other mediums such as records of legal proceedings.

My hope was to produce an article like that doesn’t just represent one version of the story told through one set of oral histories, but shows a relationship of these positions to other positions, the scope of the debate, and an understanding of a complex context. When you get so close to people, you feel a certain loyalty. But sometimes loyalty means bringing the frictions and complications to light. One can be merely an advocate, or one can ultimately allow their voices to be strengthened through a degree of struggle, of wrestling with the counternarratives. 

AP: The first temporary exhibition at MUNAVI centered on the home environment. We opened the museum to the public and invited them to contribute through their own objects. We asked people to tell the story of their objects and explain how they made them feel at home. 

Curating these objects and their stories was an emotional experience—everyone in the curatorial team related to at least one story, or two, or three. But some stories were more difficult to relate to. We had items from all over Mexico, from religious items to sports paraphernalia and books. If those contributing had written half a page about their object, we carefully selected one or two sentences for display. We wanted to represent the similarities and differences of how people live, and how they choose to make their house a home. The exhibition became a great medium for that.

Temporary exhibition, “Objetos que hacen hogar,” 2023. Photo by GLR Estudio. Courtesy of Espacio Cultural Infonavit.

JLD: Some of the stories we tell ourselves about the places we live in are not constructed on facts, and yet that doesn't make them any less valid. In the broader context of helping tell the story of a place, we have to unpack where it comes from and why it matters.

In the tours I co-lead at TSA, we often talk about the role of Georgian architecture in establishing the Britishness of Toronto. That’s an objective story—that is exactly what the British tried to do. And it doesn't stop people from feeling incredibly emotional because they didn't realize that a building they perhaps lived in or saw in their neighborhood has a whole other political layer. For people that did not fit into the story of Toronto’s Britishness, Georgian architecture tells an entirely different story—one marked by colonization and the erasure of Indigenous culture.

We also tell a lot of stories involving newly built projects, and sometimes we've had the architects come on the tours with us. What we say about buildings is not exactly what the architects might say or think about them. In some cases they are interested to hear how we interpret the building and respond positively. Other times, it’s more unsettling and we get pushback. 

Tours are a good medium for bringing together the complex and conflicting narratives we inhabit. But when we edit, curate, and tell a particular story, we’re also building our own narrative. At the end of the day there is an argument to how we do this. We make a choice about what buildings or spaces we talk about, and how we talk about them—it’s one story, a narrative among many.

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Joël León Danis is an architect and Executive Director of the Toronto Society of Architects. His work has been shaped by a strong interest in public policy, community building, and the critical dialogue between the architectural profession and the public.  

Athenea Papacostas is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural agent who studied architecture (UNAM), museum studies (ENCRyM), and dance (RAD). Based on the exploration of concepts such as authenticity, proximity, joy, and affect in the spaces we inhabit, her practice moves between materialities, performance, and relational art.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architect, historian and educator whose work is interested in Latin American histories of housing rights. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Co-Director of the Architecture program at Bard College. 

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a co-editor of Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico (Park Books, 2022).

Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is a Lecturer at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University.

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>>Talking Places

What’s in a Name?

A Conversation with Ajay Manthripragada,
Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino
September 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s third issue, What’s the Matter With Canon?, the editors convened a roundtable to explore how the changing perceptions of the architectural canon shape the modes of comprehending, organizing, and representing architectural knowledge.

How does a cultural product from the past, as is the canon, remain relevant to the myriad cultures and values around the globe—and the buildings they produce? Architecture’s inherited canon is variably understood as a defined set of architectural works and as knowledge that is (re)assessed and selected to be passed on to future generations. Depending on who you ask, the canon is either dismissed altogether—its legacy ignored—or, increasingly, reexamined through the lens of how we produce and organize contemporary architectural knowledge.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto moderated the following discussion on architecture’s canon with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino. Discussants draw on experiences from their studies, teaching, and practice. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Mai Okimoto (MO): What is canon? Does it refer to buildings—or can it be used to describe ideas? Are works described as canonical synonymous with great work? Is this term still relevant to our field today?

Ajay Manthripragada (AM): It's a big question. I'm interested in the way you're phrasing the term "canon" without the article "the." You're saying "canon," as opposed to "the canon" or "the canonical." I'm wondering if that indicates something about an interest in its redefinition or rethinking.

By definition, the canon is a Western construct. The origin of the idea—that there's a body of works to which everyone refers and agrees upon their excellence—is derived from the concept of the canonization of saints in the Catholic tradition. In an academic context, whether it's literature, art, or architecture, the canon became construed as a body of creative works. For me, that's important to acknowledge because it has a different relationship to authority.

Letícia Wouk Almino (LWA): It’s a complicated term—and increasingly less relevant. I find it difficult to use the term at all. It’s a word that is not easily dissociated from its classic definition as a particular set of Western works. With a greater diversity of people teaching at institutions and bringing in voices from all over the globe, we're transitioning away from the singular way of thinking about architecture. One way in which this is happening is through the language we use to discuss architecture—through a new set of terms to address the complexity of perspectives and modes of practice.

Alex Oetzel (AO): I don’t think the shift in attitude toward the canon, on its own, is novel. The discipline has always been dealing with cultural transformations and changes in values. What matters is how the changes are happening, who has influence, and what are the tangible outcomes...

AM: Figures in other disciplines (literature for instance) have been unabashed about defining the canon by definitively selecting a group of works. It tends to be more nebulous in architecture—the canon is implied and rehearsed over many iterations and repetitions of certain examples in academia, and, for my set of interests, in the discipline of formal analysis. There's a kind of reciprocity between the definition of the canon and formal analysis. They support each other.

I agree with Letícia—we don't have to use the word, but I appreciate aspects of what it represents because it allows us to collectively have a conversation about what we value.

LWA: I am also a disciple of formal analysis. It was preached to me, and that's how I and a lot of people learned architecture, following a lineage of academics who have also been taught this way. Naturally, you would be narrowly limited to a specific subset of buildings that can be formally analyzed; there are only certain schools of thought that allow you to talk about architecture in this way. The more I think about your question, the more I realize that the problem of the canon is a question about architecture education. If we change the conversation, we'll be open to discussing different types of buildings that don't fit within the rules of formal analysis.

AM: I agree; these are important points. As we expand the references, we also need to completely reconsider the tools by which we look at them. There is a body of representational strategies that we can leverage, adapt, and change as we look at other aspects of architecture. However, I've come to see a flaw in the argument: Why do we need to draw them at all? Why draw a plan of a building conceived outside the logic of a plan? 

AO: I think our attitudes towards the relationship between canon and education are most visible in classrooms. I recently taught a studio at Ohio State University (OSU) about high-rise hotels. Before moving to the design phase, I prepared a list of over one hundred precedents of skyscrapers across history for the students to study the formal typology and its history. We started in Chicago where the first skyscrapers were built, but I encouraged them to branch out. The quantity of towers meant each building analysis had to be very quick, and encouraged a non-hierarchical study of the typology’s historic range and collective characteristics, rather than in-depth formal analyses of specific buildings.

MO: To Alex’s point, there’s value in rethinking how we approach precedents. We have access to more information compared to fifty years ago when architectural knowledge came from fewer sources such as print publications. It’s also interesting to think about formal analysis and how it lends itself to books and exhibitions. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the changing nature of media and how that's shaping the way we're recognizing certain works.

LWA: This ties back to what Ajay mentioned about formal analysis as a tool of representation. It has its limits: it only works for buildings that have been drawn or documented. For me, this is quite exclusionary. The types of buildings that have been published are the ones that architecture institutions have historically favored through funding and resources—and are often buildings by architects who are savvy about self-promotion. In order to move away from the narrow scope of the canon, we need to diversify the ways in which information is passed down. In other words, we need educators who can develop new methodologies to confront the ever-expanding landscape of information and introduce students to varied perspectives. The unfortunate default is to reference parts of history that are the subject of easily-accessible, published materials.

AM: It is not a new idea that the expanded set of references cannot be understood autonomously as material realities in the world without understanding their deeper cultural and ritualistic significance. Therein lies a very fundamental problem in our premise: Looking at the architectural complexities of these buildings and gaining a deep knowledge of their cultural significance (particularly in the context of a design studio with its limited timeframes) substantially increases the risk of having misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and misinformation. They cannot be reduced to an elevation from which we then borrow. I don’t have an answer to the problem, but perhaps we have to open up to other forms of representation that are completely outside of the conventional drawings and models.

AO: I recently encountered Audrey Bennett’s essay, describing the history of the golden ratio from its origins in Africa to its use by the Bauhaus. The golden ratio (that celebrated, geometrically-derived divine proportion) was presented in my early architectural education as a Western (specifically ancient Greek) invention. According to Bennett, its origins are much older and applied throughout different cultures and regions from informal Sub-Saharan communities to Napoleonic Italy. Her analysis of the golden ratio is an example that shows how each generation’s understanding of the canon is heavily influenced by how their predecessors conceived and shared knowledge; possibly reduced or misremembered. Perhaps through rethinking the tools and framework of our studies, we might begin to notice forms that are shared across cultures and see ideas that are lost or misremembered by previous generations.

I’ve found myself feeling the time and curriculum constraints of what you can cover in a semester-long studio. Besides the logistic constraints, there are also limits to my own knowledge and subjectivity as an instructor. There are acts of exclusion and emphasis that happen as a result of limits of my body, mind, and time.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Even if studio resources and timeframes were to expand, is there ever a point at which everything can be comprehensively and, let’s say “democratically” studied? Is there any realistic circumstance under which no building is excluded from study?

AM: Is selecting which buildings to teach an exclusionary act? Yes, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem in itself. The methods by which we adjudicate need to change, evolve, and expand, but judgment is a part of discourse and pedagogy. The way that I've been addressing this in my seminars is to encourage students to bring projects to the table and argue for their excellence. These works can be from any source as long as the students can make the case for their close study. This opens up possibilities for authorship and criteria. The idea that there can be a body of counter-canonical works that also can be theorized (in this case according to the students' arguments) is very interesting to me.

PK: There are many useful things that we’ve inherited from this methodological framework we call the canon, and of course, we’re not talking about entirely throwing that knowledge away. Like any heritage, however, the canon and the way it is broadly understood carry the cultural values and assumptions of a certain time and place.

AM: The canon is a cultural inscription, but it claims to be otherwise. It claims that a work's greatness is inherent, independent of personal opinion. But, of course, that is impossible. The matter of assessment is always someone's opinion, and this is a paradoxical condition of the canonical. It claims to be dispassionate but by definition, it isn't. In this same paradoxical tension, I find some educational value. If we accept that the canon is a false construct, then we can keep defining it, redefining it, and using it to our advantage as an educational and cultural tool.

LWA: I continue to find a problem with referencing the term or even referencing architecture knowledge as a set of works that we need to talk about. It would be more productive to reframe the canon just as one element of architectural history. We keep returning to certain buildings and architects because they were influential to a certain subset of architects. When I teach, we discuss who these people were because architecture history is not just about the buildings. It's necessary to teach the good, bad, and ugly about the influential people of the past. Instead of canon, which implies a set of works divorced from history, it's more helpful to think about the conditions, cultures, and the influence of the people behind those works as irreducible from a specific moment in history. We're shifting away from seeing the architecture scene as an aggregation of singular works by singular geniuses. We don't all have to have the same set of references or foundational principles. Why do we need to discuss the canon as something more than a moment in history?

AO: It's worthwhile to think about a work of architecture as a point of reference—one of many—that brings us to the approximation of all the narratives built around it, its circumstances, and the people who were involved in the process of realizing it.

MO: We have been exploring the shifts in how the canon is taught and discussed. Does this shift ultimately manifest in the built environment—for example, via students that go on to work at architecture firms? Or are these kinds of changes merely happening within academia?

AM: I would answer this in relation to Letícia's points about letting the term go—implying the canon itself is going to be relegated to history. In that imagination, it would still continue to influence what we see in the world, even as a historical fact against which we work. There will always be a specter of it because it was so instrumental in the development of what we understand as a discipline. I'm on the same page as Letícia and Alex, that we should no longer think of it as a body of works to which everyone has to refer. Hopefully, the result will be a more diverse and richer reality in terms of what constitutes great architecture and who produces it.

AO: In my own work, I listen to clients and users describe their preferred way of living and then study ways to translate or materialize their needs using architectural modes of representation. For me, it's important to include them in the design process. This experience is particularly rewarding because it places me face to face with stakeholders who are not coming from years of architecture education that calibrate their references, and can freely engage in conversations about architecture from different perspectives. They don’t have nor need to have extensive knowledge of architecture.

LWA: There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we evaluate what is a good work of architecture. Within the tradition of formal analysis, there's almost no need for the building to be built in the first place to be considered good. How do we continue to talk about what is a good work of architecture beyond the narrow conversation around what is a formally good building? What is it like to live in a building? Who are the users? I hope we can develop a framework that allows us to talk with rigor about these topics in academia. It will change how non-architects perceive the built environment, and the conversations happening in architecture schools will become more accessible and relevant to them.

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Ajay Manthripragada is the 2023-24 Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Prior, he was Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Alex Oetzel is an architect and educator, typically located in Ohio. She works (more or less) at Moody Nolan and Ohio State University while serving on the AIA Ohio Board of Directors. She enjoys writing for the New York Review of Architecture, attending summer school with the Architecture Lobby, and celebratory donuts.

Letícia Wouk Almino is an architect, artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught architectural studio and drawing courses at Barnard College and Pratt Institute. Her artwork has been exhibited at 411 Gallery, Pratt SoA Gallery, and at the Center for Architecture.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works as an architectural designer in Houston.

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>>What’s the Matter with Canon?

Speaking of Writing

A Conversation with Scott Colman,
Sydney Shilling, and Brittany Utting
January 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s inaugural issue, Who Gets to Write?, the editors convened a roundtable on the topic of how architecture is communicated to the public, bringing together perspectives from design practice, journalism, and academia. 

Writing shapes the way architecture is understood internally by architects, and externally by the public. Historically, the tools required for writing—time, vocabulary, and space for reflection—have been available only to a narrow subset of people. The old adage that history is written by the victors plays itself out daily in practice and the academy: The distribution of wealth and leisure under late-stage capitalism determines who among us has the time and bandwidth to put pen to paper.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Sebastián López Cardozo moderated the following discussion with Scott Colman, Brittany Utting, and Sydney Shilling on the state of writing (and reading) in architecture, and the growing distance between our discipline and the public. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): Who gets to write? Do certain people have more access to the act of writing than others? Who gets to shape architectural discourse today, and what resources are needed to do so?

Scott Colman (SC): It's a big question. People don't have time to write because they're often laboring for low money for long hours. Writing, as a mode of reflection on architectural design, used to be fundamental to architecture practice—at least in the western tradition. Because of capital and its structuring division of labor, the distinction between specialists within the discipline has been growing; all of the labels that we have for what people do—theorist, historian, academic, practitioner …—are products of that system. In the current system of design practice, we're structurally inhibited from having this kind of reflection—we are restricted to specialized roles, and we have little room to reflect. To have time and space for these reflections would lead us to question the system. So, the question of "who gets to write?" is as much a political question as a structural one.

So, in a way, your setup is an effort to find ways to hack the system. Now, the only way we get to consciously engage the politics of design is to do it on our own time with our own dime, using any surplus means, or any surreptitious communication tools we have. I'm one of those privileged people who have been given the opportunity to be able to spend at least part of my time writing. And so I have an enormous responsibility that I should feel more often than I probably do.

Brittany Utting (BU): The question asked for this panel is: “Who gets to write?” You could have asked “Who has to write? Who needs to write? Who doesn't write? Who won't write?” It’s important to unpack the implications of your phrasing, and what audiences it includes and excludes. More traditional forms of architectural writing typically take place in sites of “sanctioned” discourse: journals, magazines, and books. Increasingly, however, alternative formats of exchange are emerging: activist letter writing, open-source curricula, and even satirical memes. These different practices of writing have the potential to expand the notions of audience and authorship, but they also participate in a complex system of labor relations and exchanges that themselves aren’t free from exploitation.

Sydney Shilling (SS): It's important to mark the distinction between shaping the discourse and writing, because I don't think we can say that the discourse is only happening in publication. For instance, look at @fa.front and @architectural.workers.united on Instagram—the grassroots movements they have created are impactful, started through their own agency with virtually no resources. They didn't rely on traditional outlets to give them permission or to publish. Social media platforms, despite all their flaws, have in many ways democratized the conversation. In today’s saturated media landscape, it is an absolute privilege to have an audience, but as far as the privilege of being able to write is concerned, writing is as accessible as it has ever been. And in fact, the architectural worker is the ideal architectural writer, because they have a facility of language with which to discuss projects that is rare within the broader field of journalism.

SC: In the history of western architecture, this kind of architectural writing—what we call architectural criticism—arose with the public sphere, alongside newspapers and other modes of more democratic communication. Architects were no longer beholden just to the nobility or to the church, but also to the public at large. And now there's a fundamental crisis in democratic discourse, as the space to reflect and criticize shrinks everyday—especially in the last thirty years or so—due to the structure of the market and the neoliberal system of value.

BU: The question of writing’s accessibility that Sydney refers to is an interesting one. For instance, short forms of writing are accessible because they can more easily fit into the frameworks of social media that are increasingly defining the public sphere. But these shorter formats can also have the effect of flattening discourse: reducing disciplinary arguments to a quick quip, an image, or a few hundred characters. Although those formats can expand discourse into visible sites that are more immediately political, they can also make longer forms of conversation and more nuanced exchanges impossible.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Scott brought up an interesting point about democratization. Is there a connection between more accessible language and democratization? Is the consumer-driven "accessibility" that happens under capitalism a function of reduced leisure time to read and think? 

SC: It's complicated. The distance between architectural discourse, criticism, practice, and the general public has never been as wide as it is now. As mentioned earlier, architectural criticism was synonymous with public discourse. Through newspapers, socialist journals, and even gatherings in union halls, critics, academics, and practitioners conveyed their thoughts through a language that was accessible to the public. But as the different parts of the discipline have more intensively specialized, a certain language has developed—inevitably—among the experts. As a result, the space for reflecting on architecture has shifted away from publicly accessible media to specialized forums.

SS:  It makes me wonder to what extent the journalist serves as translator between the architect and the public. Communication about built works have been increasingly taken over by firms’ marketing and public relations departments. But in order to connect readers and writers, we need authors who can speak about architecture in plain language. The needlessly academic jargon prevalent in architectural writing is a barrier to growing an audience outside the profession. This hinders the public’s ability to engage in this discourse in meaningful ways.

PK: Any business that relies on traffic for ad revenue benefits from an increase in consumers. News and media companies have broad access to complex tools and metrics, and can tune their content to attract more traffic. But as columnist David Carr wrote for the New York Times some years ago on the risks of traffic-hungry journalism, “just because something is popular does not make it worthy.” Under this business model, the project of making architecture more accessible (in its image and written form) risks entanglement with questions of marketability for advertisers, and pushes elements of social, economic, and environmental significance—what makes writing “worthy”—aside.

BU: This perhaps is the role that emerging forms of journalism can play: to create a public space for intellectual inquiry and debate that can happen independent of a market-based translation of architecture to consumers.

SLC: I see two aspects to the question of writing’s accessibility that seem to be at odds with one another. At the core, there is the ethically-rooted, journalistic mission to create a more informed public and deepen their appreciation and engagement with architecture. This mode of writing is more likely to embody Carr’s idea of what makes writing “worthy”… Yet, when ad-revenue weighs too heavily, readership numbers trump any notion of worthiness. The difficulty in challenging this second, traffic-driven mode of writing is that it is still about a certain idea of accessibility: It’s giving the majority of readers what they want to see.

SS: Everything comes at a price. The industry has to be able to sustain itself one way or another. It is a very delicate balance to find a way to support the business of writing financially, and not sacrifice journalistic integrity.

BU: That’s why these alternative writing practices are so critical. For example, projects such as AWW function outside of both the traditional systems of academic review as well as profit-driven models of journalism. Such projects are ground-up, edited by students and recent grads, supported by non-profit institutions, and don’t need to sell a minimum number of copies to break even. However, because such formats exist outside of a financial or academic market, the ideas produced in these journals typically rely on forms of labor that are unwaged. When asking the question “Who gets to write?” it’s critical to also acknowledge not only the different value systems and formats of exchange in publishing, but also how the labor of writing is often hidden in discourse.

SLC: Sydney, in your work as a journalist, I know you're quite interested in this notion that there is a gatekeeping of architectural discourse through language—for example, through the way architects use internal, academic jargon that is often inaccessible and requires a certain level of education to access.

SS: I think that the question of accessibility is a difficult one, but architectural writing, and in particular academic writing, tends to be written for an academic audience. If we allow academia to become the only voice and agent to shape the discourse, we'll shrink the discipline into an echo chamber, where only those who have the luxury to read will have the luxury to write, and vice versa. In that scenario, what happens to the perspectives and voices outside of academia that don't necessarily have the resources to contribute to the conversation? There are not enough outlets talking about architecture in plain language that the public can easily understand, and this prevents the public from engaging with issues within the built environment.

BU: It's provocative to think about how we can write for non-architects—not as future clients, but as co-participants in the public sphere. Most design magazines cater to a wealthy clientele while many architectural journals are limited to only academic audiences. Far fewer platforms support writing for a public that focuses on the inequities embedded in the built environment—architects writing for and with their communities as they negotiate the political, environmental, and financial conditions of design.

SLC: Since 2020, we’ve seen a shift within the architecture community’s attitude—a willingness and urgency to engage with issues of labor, the Western-centric pedagogy, privilege, systemic racism, and more. I think all of us at AWW have felt that there has also been a renewed interest and appreciation for different forms of writing or expression, like memes and social media platforms. Maybe Sydney can share her experience writing an article on architectural workers’ unionization efforts. Would this have happened before 2020?

SS: That conversation probably could not have happened five years ago. I think that the pandemic necessitated a change in perspective. Many of these issues could no longer be ignored—priorities changed. I was seeing conversations about architectural labor (which had already been happening, albeit mostly in private) unfold on social media, and I thought about how to best translate these conversations to an architecture audience, and to spotlight the impact of the grassroots work. It was a challenging issue to cover, especially at a magazine where the majority of our readership consists of practitioners. But the industry seemed ready to confront these difficult conversations.

BU: Why wasn't this type of content being reported to wider audiences beforehand? Efforts addressing the issues of architectural labor have been going on for years. And so it’s interesting that it was only after the social and health stress of the pandemic and the immense pressure exerted by the Black Lives Matter movement that those issues got the traction to be discussed more broadly in the profession—and that they were actually implemented in firms across the world.

SS: Critical mass was really important in publishing stories like this because there is an inherent risk in publishing content that is, in some ways, critical of your audience. At the same time, we want to create relevant and valuable content, which is why it's so important that these issues are publicized to a wider audience. Until recently, the public really had no idea what it takes to produce a building. As a society, it's difficult to know what you value if you don't understand the invisible labor behind these projects. People are starting to acknowledge what the reality is, and this will enable people to advocate for change.

SC: There was an essay written by Sylvia Lavin maybe 15 years ago, called “Conversations Over Cocktails.” Its thesis was that written architectural discourse had died and the academic discourse of architecture was happening “over cocktails.” The obvious implication is that a society organized through verbal discourse is a society in which power operates behind the scenes as opposed to out in the open. These things are absolutely connected. There may be a thousand million tweets every second, but the way the world is actually being reorganized is through a series of very tight, specialized, increasingly privatized conversations.

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Scott Colman is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture.

Sydney Shilling is the Assistant Editor of Azure Magazine, an international publication with a focus on contemporary architecture and design.

Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture and co-director of the research and design collective HOME-OFFICE.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a frequent contributor at the New York Review of Architecture.

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>>Who Gets to Write?