Abstract
Albena Yaneva’s book is devoted to an ethnographic study of the design process of a building: the extension of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, designed by the architectural office of the world famous architect Rem Koolhaas. This building was never built, but its story is long and rich enough to make the book an interesting one. The main theoretical reference used for the research is the actor–network theory, which was initially elaborated to study scientific research, but is also used in other fields of research. As both scientific research and architectural design consists in generating ideas or designing objects collectively, the theory chosen fits the case very well. It allows meeting the actors involved in the process. The division of labour inside Koolhaas’s office, and the relationships with other professionals and non-professionals are well described. The question addressed by this prospect of research concerns what it allows learning beyond the story of the building itself. However little representative of architectural work in general this building is, most of Albena Yaneva’s statements about what she observed during her research sound rather familiar to a reader who knows already a little about architecture. The difficulties met during the design are not totally singular, even if the location of the museum on Madison Avenue in New York is exceptional. The aims of the work do not therefore seem compelling. For instance, the constraints due to the environment, described in the first chapter, are familiar to any architect whose work takes place in modern cities: on the one hand, the constraints of the immediate surroundings (the 1966 remarkable Whitney Museum and six nineteenth-century brownstone buildings); on the other hand, the zoning envelope defined by the 1916 Zoning Resolution Law. Actually, reflecting on how to integrate a building into its environment has been part of the core of architectural activity for centuries. The contents of the design work are no less familiar. One sees how the architects analyse the situation and their own project using various means of representation: models and different techniques of drawings, in order to determine what they should or could do next in the design process. One sees also how successive presentations of the project to actors lead to integrate new requirements to it.
Generally speaking, my feeling is that much of what Yaneva describes is by no means the expression of the office’s or the building’s singularity. However, the author does not seek to propose any systematic interpretation of what architecture is. Her conclusion tells more about the actor–network theory and the pragmatist approach than about the activity the book is devoted to. She is not interested in the social or institutional conditions of architectural work (such as collective concerns, knowledge and know-how which are transmitted from generation to generation and allow architects to do their work) that one could seek to identify for instance through the comparison of several projects.
Yaneva chooses to focus on practices and to describe them from as near a perspective as possible. This is relevant with the general anti-institutional prospect of the actor–network theory. But this leads to an underestimation of the collective cognitive resources architects need to fulfil their work. The personal talent of Rem Koolhaas and his co-workers is probably exceptional. But their activity is made possible first by their mastering of collective know-how without which they could not manage to face the complexity of the situations they had to deal with. Actually, despite the wide variety of conceptions of architecture and ways of designing a building, the same concerns are shared even by architects whose conceptions of architecture are far from each other: concern for the environment, the utilities and the harmony, and so on. Moreover, the work supposes to master the design process and the use of various techniques of drawings: not only the kind of perspective drawings which emerged during the Renaissance in Italy that allowed separating design and construction, and whose technique was improved by generations of architects, but also a collective knowledge about how to use them. For example, to go ahead with a project supposes an ability to draw. But how do architects choose what to draw? No roadmap tells exactly what to do. This depends on the details of the project and of its progress analysis. But even if there is no one best choice, there are relevant choices, and other which are not, because those would not solve the difficulties met and would lead to a dead-end. The difference between relevant and irrelevant choices is exactly what teachers seek to make clear for their students.
Going ahead by drawing a part of a building presupposes four choices: (1) about the point of view on the project (at this point, is it helpful to draw this facade, or rather this section of the inside, or anything else?); (2) about the kind of drawing (plan, perspective, etc.); (3) about the scale of the drawing; (4) about its precision (freehand drawing vs more precise drawing). These four choices are often at least partly implicit, but their logic can be made explicit by asking questions. A first rule consists in focusing on where one meets difficulties. Then there are other rules or regularities. The scale increases through the process. The drawings become more precise, even if sketches can be used at any scale and nearly at any stage of the design process. All architects begin by learning these rules about the use of design, not systematically but through exercises. There are of course some variations in the way to implement these rules, but they are less significant than the fact that very different architects implement the same general rules. Without the mastering of these rules – among other specific know-how – their personal talent could not have developed. Yaneva’s pragmatist approach centred on one building does not allow us to understand this process. However, investigating the collective know-how of architects is possible in principle.
The choice to focus on practices without looking at what allows them has several questionable consequences. This allows a rich narrative. Noticeably, the ambiance and rhythms of work are well rendered. But at the end of the book, one wonders what exactly the findings are. What have we learned about architecture, independently of the peculiar case study chosen by Yaneva? People who are familiar with it will recognize what they know already, but others are very likely to miss the difference between what is typical and what is contingent in the story. Second, the lack of a strong analytic frame leads to questionable statements. However close to practices the story is, it is by no means neutral. Let’s consider again the integration of the building in its environment. Describing successively various constraints, Yaneva puts at the same level the 1966 Whitney Museum, the six nineteenth-century brownstone buildings and the zoning envelope. She investigates successively what each of them ‘does to the project’, asking for instance ‘What does the zoning do to the models of the Whitney?’ (p. 69). Then she adds: ‘Following architects at work in his office, one can witness how the “zoning envelop” acts like a real architect’ (p. 71). But the zoning envelope is neither (the result of) an architectural work, nor the same kind of constraint as the existing buildings surrounding the project. It is actually the result of a reflection of landscape planners. But unlike the work of architects, this reflection does not take other dimensions of the construction into account. And unlike the buildings surrounding the project, which are the support of an analytical work to find out how their presence should be taken into account in the new project, it imposes itself on the architect without any possible deliberation on its relevance. It determines the building’s envelope a priori, that is, before any general reflection. That is why it does not ‘act like a real architect’. But a more systematic analytical work on what architects actually do and the know-how which allows them to do it would have been necessary to see the difference.
Third, this lack of reflection on the social conditions of architecture has also political consequences. What Koolhaas and his co-workers manage to do seems to be permitted only by their own personal talents. The architectural profession and its historically built culture, knowledge and know-how do not appear in this book. So this pragmatic approach prevents us from understanding what differentiates architects from others, and why it may be wise to give them conditions that allow them to do their work properly.
This remark should not be understood as a corporatist defence of the architectural profession. Sociologists such as Eliot Freidson have put enough emphasis on the misuses of professional autonomy to prevent us from defending it without reserve or conditions. But even if some controls on the decisions taken by architects are necessary, their work presupposes a wide autonomy of reflection, notably in order to analyse the details of the situation in which they intervene in-depth, so as to seek solutions to overcome the tensions between various aims of their activity, and to balance these aims when they cannot meet each of them as well as they would like to. Assimilating zoning rules with the work of architects does not allow us to understand this. For this reason, the pragmatist approach and the actor–network theory have political effects. They overemphasize the importance of individuals and contingency, but shed no light on the social conditions of professional practices. But as the golden age is over for most professions (their work is made more difficult by current evolutions such as the bureaucratization of the contexts of work, the defiance of their clients, the increase in the division of labour and the routinization of work), the invisibility of the reasons we have to preserve their autonomy of reflection is one more factor of their weakness. As sociology cannot be neutral when it is confronted with this kind of issue, we should seek to develop theoretical attitudes aiming at counterbalancing the individualist image pragmatist sociology and actor–network theory give of professional practices.