Men obsessed with boxes and Heroes
This isn't an Article about Mari Kondo or Gender, this intends to be an exploration of Contemporary Architecture or more precisely Architecture Theory in times when seems impossible to understand or describe what Architecture is and where is going.
From Vasari to Jencks: everyone has to find its place
It isn't that original to look back and try to find a start point, but let's try to do this for the sake of understanding our bias. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is arguably the first person in the Western Hemisphere that tried to put together a History of Art from the perspective of Who is Who, rather than explaining it as the result of methods and styles, so he wrote: "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects " (1550 first ed. & 1568 second ed.) where he gathered information about the guys doing the stuff in the Italy of that Time, actually in that time didn't exist something like Italy, it was more a space with common background. Even if the concept came many years later, Vasari's book is the sort of what we know as Encyclopedia, one need to understand that knowledge was scarce and difficult to transmit, so one had to rely on small capsules of information that has to be memorized and repeated.
This brings us to a chicken-egg question that is: was the medium to transmit the information the one that shaped the way we considered it or was the other way around? I'm convinced that the nature of the mediums or media we have to our reach configures the way we communicate our ideas and by doing so influences the way we build opinion and culture. This could explain why this encyclopedic way of telling the History of Architecture has been so predominant and has shaped the way we understand architecture itself.
During the centuries after Vasari's book, the Study of Architecture and its History will be shaped by this approach: the life and anecdotes of the big figures were told from one generation to another with the hope that one will be the next big figure to have its heroic moment: a marvellous task to solve or the next big idea about how to solve a problem for example. This created the Figure of a Hero Architect (yes, usually a Man) that had some kind of supernatural power to solve all of the difficulties of a project and has an unnatural knowledge about everything.
But as with the comic superheroes, it is easier to study them if one group and gives purpose to them, but how to do it? Simple, you group them by their common features and by doing so the Styles become an identity. From an academic point of view, the Styles are a tool: you combine a set of pieces, following a certain set of rules to obtain certain effects. The people looking for heroes look for the quirks and the dexterity somebody shows using these tools and make his/her solutions unique. But these creatures are alive, isn't? so this means they change and act with total freedom creating new categories, often to get rid of the simplistic ways to classify them and searching for more recognition. So they write stuff, Architects love to write manifestos and declare how the things should be done. This way a new category rises and it is the affiliation by intellectual interests and not only by aesthetics, so the Movements were born. This is very important during the last year's of the XIX Century and the whole XX, where the shifting made it clear that it was more pertinent to group Architects and their work based on their ethical premises that on their looks. This is how Siegfried Gideon, Leonardo Benévolo or Reyner Banham shaped the architectural debate during the XX Century and helped to create a discourse about certain things like urban policy, health and hygiene in Housing or shape of production facilities.
Of course, there was a point where the things got too complicated to pack Architects into boxes with clear boundaries, especially in the period after the Second World War when some People began to realize that the World is bigger than Western Europe and the United States and the People around the World tackle the same problems with other approaches, especially because local conditions did play a roll in how a building or a city is shaped. The result was a more organic box, it still is a box but more fluid and this approach is better exemplified by Charles Jencks who produced a good amount of evolution trees and blobs to explain the relations between Architects, Movements and "things" (there are a lot of things even critics doesn't manage to identify properly and are just referred as things happening). More recently Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Guillermo Fernández Abascal worked out a "Political Compass for the Contemporary Architecture" where they associate the architectural firms based on their practice and certain data, mostly obtained by interviews with them.
Boxes are useful to classify and understand the World, but still being boxes, we shouldn't forget this.
The End of History: The Star System Architects were the last Rockstars
By this point, you are figuring out that the question has been shifted from the individuum and put somewhere else, putting at risk the Figure of a Hero Architect, but this isn't the only change. Books become less relevant to study and communicate, to form an opinion and therefore a History, so the first step was towards Magazines, a more fluid format capable of faster update and tackling more issues. Yes, this means that the profession of Architecture Critic is dying too. If Vasari was the first huge figure in this field, Philip Johnson was the last one. Of course, there are many other still today, but this is a role that has been watered down by the reality and conduces to this "headless architecture" we see nowadays.
With the magazines, Architects found a way to be more fluid in their communication, killed the middleman (The Critic) that validated and created their boxes, but by doing so they forced themselves to become Socialités and became, even more, a product to sell with all that implies.
In the late '70s and early 80's the last generation of big Heroes was born: the Starchitects. They got different catchy names like New York Five, the Deconstructuvists and so on. Their history is too long for this place now, but the evolution of their careers marked the end of the traditional way to do Architecture, especially because they were the last group capable of having a big influence in the practice while having control of their Studios. All of their architecture studios have grown up to become companies, with shareholders, insurances, HR Departments, subsidiary companies in charge of technology development (Gehry Technologies) or social studies (AMO). Those who failed in doing so have been doomed to be forgotten, like Peter Eisenman.
This means for small firms that reaching the point of being influential in the whole field is even more distant than in previous generations, in one hand those who validate Who is Who exist no more, on the other hand, to be able to build a seminal work one needs to achieve a certain scale that is almost impossible to achieve in a life's term. I definitely don't like the claim of Francis Fukuyama: the history has ended, but I have to admit that in a broader sense he is right, the conditions in where Architecture is practised has changed very profoundly and threatens the very figure of what an Architect is. This in an Era of Instagram, LinkedIn and fear mongering of Generative Design and AI.
Neither boxes or Heroes are a reasonable way to explain the field right now, this shouldn't be a dramatic thing, this is just a sign that the practice has changed and we need to find better ways to understand and communicate what Architecture is and what we do. Probably the next Vasari isn't going to be somebody who write about the life and work of his buddies, but somebody that is capable of putting together a narrative about the topics that influence the architectural practice. The Heroes of the future, I hope, will continue to be critics of their Societies and less Instagram-Influencers as the tendency has tried to force in recent Years.
