Inflection 05: Feedback

Journal of the Melbourne School of Design

Jack Self, Greg Lynn, Christine Wamsler, Nicole Lambrou, Lucia Amies, Samuel Chesbrough, Sarah Mair, Olivia Potter, William Ward

• Publisher: AADR – Art Architecture Design Research
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783887785475
• eBook ISBN: 9783887789145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The term 'big data' is virtually ubiquitous in both cultural and technical contexts.The fifth volume of Inflection is an open-ended investigation into how designers are interpreting and countering the prevailing narrative that pushes for greater efficiency and automation using sophisticated data analytics. Feedback gathers a wide range of responses, united by their collective advocacy for a sophisticated understanding of processes, frameworks and ethics.Inflection is a student-run design journal based at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Born from a desire to stimulate debate and generate ideas, it advocates the discursive voice of students, academics and practitioners. Founded in 2013, Inflection is a home for provocative writing—a place to share ideas and engage with contemporary discourse.

FUCK YEAH HUME

ARCHITECTURAL TASTE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Hamish Lonergan

Social media, so the accepted narrative goes, is a free space where people voice opinions and display tastes without the cultural gatekeepers of offline institutes and print media. Social media should represent the most complete dataset of architectural taste ever assembled: feedback on the state of the discipline. The popularity of postmodernism and brutalism online, on pages like FuckYeahBrutalism (FYB), has been interpreted as a kind of grassroots nostalgia and as a transgressive reaction to the ‘good taste’ of much of contemporary architecture.¹ These are cheery thoughts— unfiltered feedback on what people really want—but wrong.

Matters of taste are an old concern of aesthetics, that branch of philosophy which deals with what can be sensed and what is beautiful. David Hume’s writing on the way society’s taste is informed by the judgments of ‘true critics’ reframes the contemporary taste for brutalism and postmodernism as the popular expression of long-standing critical and academic discourse. Indeed, key Tumblr and Instagram accounts recreate the same hierarchical structures as traditional modes of criticism rather than representing ‘democratic’ online taste. Ultimately Hume suggests that this may not be a bad thing. The type of criticism we see online points the way to better modes of architectural criticism; a type of criticism where every review is part of a greater cultural arc towards a standard of taste determined by many critics across many years.

Criticism in 140 Characters

Searching for Hume’s ‘true critic’ online remains a somewhat radical proposition. It assumes that those running social media accounts are critics, when there is ongoing argument whether any architectural writing online is criticism, outside of platforms connected to traditional media and a few established architecture websites such as Dezeen. Naomi Stead has written that such discussions often centre on the difference between amateur, opinionated discourse linked to other parts of popular culture, and an entrenched subdiscipline “with very strong and well-defined conventions —of tone, of vocabulary, of comportment, of image-text relationship.”² Image-based social media widens this difference even further. Twitter and Instagram impose strict restrictions on the number of characters. Even on Tumblr a user must engage with lengthier pieces of writing by clicking ‘see more’ after the first paragraph to reveal what follows.

The most popular brutalist social media account—Fuck Yeah Brutalism—has amassed 220,000 followers since 2009 with images alone. The Tumblr’s founder, Michael Abrahamson, has never written much to accompany his photos, and nothing that could be called an argument. For this reason, Tom Wilkinson, in an essay in Architectural Review, accused Abrahamson of failing to use his popularity to say anything of substance about brutalism. The implication was that Abrahamson was offering his opinion on the architecture as an enthusiast; an especially popular member of the public, but one who failed to understand his role as a critic.³ Yet a text-based journal is very different to an image-based platform like Tumblr, and it follows that what makes Wilkinson’s essay a good piece of criticism in print is not the same as what makes Abrahamson successful online.

Hume, writing in the 18^th century, sought to understand the role of critics in relation to taste more broadly. Hume’s empiricism lead him to establish general rules for observable phenomena, just as his contemporaries in science observed the natural world and formulated the laws that might govern it.⁴ Indeed, for Hume, a critic is as easily observed as a force of nature: “[t]he ascendant, which they acquire, gives a prevalence to that lively approbation, with which they receive any production of genius, and renders it generally predominant.”⁵ In short, the public can identify a ‘true critic’ by the observable fact that their criticism is accepted by society.

This does not mean, however, that social media accounts with high numbers of followers are automatically ‘true critics’. Hume is more complex than this. The critic’s judgments— those images that Abrahamson deems worthy of his Tumblr— are the expression of their finer senses and the “concurrence of many favourable circumstances,” which others recognise and laud.⁶ Hume summarises these ‘favourable circumstances’ as “[s]trong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice.”⁷ Where the presence of these finer senses is disputed, Hume writes, “men can do no more than in other disputable questions, which are submitted to the understanding: they must produce the best arguments, that their invention suggests to them.”⁸ The same “arguments” can be used, in reverse, to determine if Abrahamson should be considered a ‘true critic’ according to Hume’s requirements.

Michael Abrahamson, a Humean Critic

The first characteristic of a Humean critic is the simplest: whether Abrahamson acted with “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object.”⁹ Abrahamson identifies the consistently high quality of his photographs as one of the reasons for his Tumblr’s success, writing that “[g]iven the same selectivity and consistency, any style of architecture would likely have been equally successful.”¹⁰ He spends several hours a week locating his images, which he scans from books and journals dating from the mid-1960s, “the heyday of brutalism.”¹¹ This implies a number of things: Abrahamson has access to a high-quality physical library from which to source material; he has the time to do so; and has knowledge of where to look. All this is made possible through his academic position as a Ph.D candidate at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, ensuring that “serenity of mind.”

Abrahamson has written extensively on the history of brutalism. Often, however, it functions as a type of criticism— making judgments on a buildings worth and comparing it to other works. A piece on Josef Breuer’s Whitney in New York evaluates the brutalist museum’s worth against Michael Graves’ proposed postmodern extension, satisfying Hume’s second characteristic: to practise making judgments of taste and comparison.¹² Hume suggests that, like any skill, taste is improved with regular use and can be lost without it.¹³ Another essay, on Gunnar Birkerts’ Tougaloo College in Jackson Mississippi, makes a subtle argument about the architectural value of the “utopianism and virtuosity of the campus plan,”while acknowledging the social harm of designing a concrete form approximating urban environments to prepare rural black students for segregated city life and work.¹⁴ The work is considered as it was intended—as utopian, but judged problematically so—and shows that Abrahamson writes without a prejudicial and unreflective enthusiasm for all brutalist buildings. This satisfies Hume’s “good sense” which “checks the influence of prejudice”—the third characteristic—while still considering the work in the manner which it was intended; Hume’s fourth characteristic.¹⁵

Abrahamson’s definition of brutalism is broad; he writes that “it’s hard to say what one means when using the term brutalism, but one knows it when one sees it.”¹⁶ This intangible quality hints at Hume’s fifth characteristic: “delicacy of taste.” Hume famously illustrated this point with the story of Sancho’s kinsmen from Don Quixote. One declares a supposedly excellent hogshead of wine good, bar a taste of iron, and the other declares it good but for a taste of leather. At first, they are mocked, but both are proven right when a key and a “leathern thong” are found at the bottom. Hume thinks that the kinsmen required two things: taste buds more finely attuned than others and the experience and practice to know when something pleases them or not.¹⁷ In a similar way, there is a delicacy required in selecting which buildings are worthy of posting to FYB. After all, even Banham and the Smithsons disagreed on its precise definition when they conceived the term, and ever since brutalism has applied to different buildings for different people.

T. Cook, after W. Hogarth, after M. de Cervantes Saavedra, Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s squire) being starved, n.d. Engraving. From Wikimedia Commons, released into public domain.

The stakes of who is and is not a critic are high for Hume. He wrote that “it is natural for us to seek a ‘standard of taste’,” which determines a common conception of beauty in various arts.¹⁸ It is only on the foundation of this standard that we can begin to compare one work with another, making the sorts of comparison that are at the heart of criticism. The basis for this standard is found in Hume’s observation:

Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Contents
• Editorial
• Olivia Potter Notes on Point Clouds
• Sarah Hirschman Harold as Feedback’s Foil: Improvisational Comedy and Architecture
• Jack Self With Great Power…
• Kevin Jones Territories of Feedback: Process, Project and Pedagogy in the Design of a New University Library in Malawi, Africa
• Curtis Roth Ten Outsourced Interiors: On the Disentanglement of Creative Expression from Productive Labour
• Alice Schenk-Green and Michael Thorpe 200 Years of Identity
• William Ward A Red Wine Cheers: To the Intimacies of Industry
• Joshua Bolchover On Frameworks
• Hamish Lonergan Fuck Yeah Hume: Architectural Taste on Social Media
• Joseph Norster and Millie Cattlin Analogue Loop: These Are The Projects We Do Together
• Nicole Lambrou Making Landscapes Legible: An Ecology of Feedback Loops
• Isabella Ascenzo How to Survive Aleppo
• Jil Raleigh Treeplayer: Reconnecting People and Trees Through Sound
• Greg Lynn The Future of Craft
• Christine Wamsler On Resilience and Natural Disasters
• James Bowman Fletcher Boiling Water: Contemporary Society’s Misplaced Preoccupation With Time-Saving Devices
• Alexander Ford and Nicholas Gervasi Experimental Preservation: Architectural Assimilation of an Ephemeral Monument Through Experimental Preservation
• Back Cover