The End of Technic as Proxy in the Praxis for Presencing Architecture


2. A disjunction between Praxis
and the Idea Architecture.

As you may have noticed I did not speak of architecture, but of the architect. I am enlivening my approach from the side of practice. The profession of architecture is a function of people presencing architecture for the benefit of people. This may seem obvious as an architect’s goal, perhaps simplistic and vague, even though at first we feel we know exactly what that would be about.

Dana Cuff1 spent a lot of time defining the nature of American practice beginning at about the time I began my career in the 80s. Although based in American evidence a generation ago, the issues are in principle no different today, and may be easily recognized in cultures around the world. I have seen it in India, the middle east and in Australia, as well as in Europe. Adolf Loos among others set us on this path in the heartfelt realization that technology with attributes of materialism and the scientific, would become a very big challenge to architects indeed.

While the former is the symptomology of practice — what we are doing as architects — architecture itself IS based upon a meaningful word to most of us. And it is also a positive word in that we automatically fill it with what we like as our image of meaning. Architecture is a wide idea that we all seem to share at some level in principle — it is a defined objective cultural reality in which we participate individually. It is originally known to us in the same way we know ourselves: we feel it. It is a more original knowledge.

It doesn’t take much to realize that neither the idea of architecture nor the practice of its presencing are really working in a balance, nor are they fully covering a necessity for architecture’s liveliness. Neither separately nor in their interrelationship. One could say there’s a difference between what is called architecture, what we (sincerely or ignorantly)expect — that is, what we believe we are expressing — and what architecture is actually being. There IS evidence of a dichotomy and disjunction between what theory and study of architecture reference in the name of architecture, and how our built environment and its interaction with Nature are being created. This is not merely the difference between research and experiment and the pragmatism of construction. It is the lack of delivery from one to the other of what is done. They do not fulfill each other. This is what I wish now to open up with a play on the terms of the discussion.

This disjunction and what it covers is not a dimensionless fault, but a great concealed zone of functionality which allows the commonly known — which is the architect practicing accordingly — to exist with the concealed (and therefore not-known), which is architecture evolving and evolved in tune with Nature. Technology serves architects necessarily in the execution of presencing architecture in the environments of Nature, but it also serves as a proxy. That proxy exists because architects can not express architecture’s value on its own terms in the venues and means available today. The symptom of this is the lack of a meaningful functional definition for architecture and Dana Cuff’s exemplary listing of issues provide a symptomatology of one thing when taken as a whole.
1    Dana Cuff. Architecture: The Story of Practice. Architecture/Sociology, Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1991.

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michael@karassowitsch.ca 2013