When digital tools became ubiquitous for the conception and transmission of architectural ideas towards the end of the twentieth century, the focus of architectural discourse shifted — moving away from the reflective and critical modes which had largely defined it throughout the “postmodern” decades, towards the experimentation with new fabrication techniques, and the digital generation of form; what is more, its forms of public presentation have acquired new dimensions with the digital media of communication: In the last decades, the discipline has thus found itself more concerned with “performative” than with “reflective” activity.
This modus operandi was aligned with the explosive expansion of the new urban agglomerations in Asia and the Middle East, from Dubai to Shenzhen, and have been decidedly progressivist without, however, really resuscitating the pioneering spirit that characterised the 1950s or the utopian zeal of the 1960s. The unapologetically “modern” drive has rendered architecture self-assured in its procedures but has deflected from self-questioning and self-doubt — more generally, it has to a large extent suspended disciplinary self-reflection.
Yet, when the party comes to an end — when sanitary, financial and geopolitical crises pile up, as they did in the early 2020s — a certain introspection imposes itself upon the discipline. The reaction to the post-crisis world can take different directions to engage with theory, history, the social milieu, and culture at large; amongst them, irony is one mode of self-reflection which can help the discipline cope with the contemporary challenges and its self-perception.
Against this background, AR / 2024 is calling for original papers that address this debate in three thematic clusters: A first section, HISTORY and APOCALYPSE, regroups analyses of contemporary architectural culture which reactivate histories pertaining to past crises and catastrophes. Those could contain arguments about the spirited pliancy of value systems and the cyclical return of paradigms, the play with cultural tropes and reference, or the seemingly fatal return of scenarios about historical end games and denouements. Parallels could be drawn with the postmodern revival of history and its romantic fascination with the ethics and aesthetics of fragmentation and ruin.
The second section, POLITICS and PRETENCE, assumes the pragmatist theorem that ‘there is nothing beneath socialization’, and sheds light on the personalized exuberance and Promethean imaginary which grounds certain contemporary ideas in architecture. The contexts of the emerging metropoles and the sites for cosmopolitan stardom architecture are especially prone to the emergence of an aesthetics and discourse of flamboyancy, ostentatiousness, and showiness. Irony plays with the cleverness and being-in-the-know of the discursive partners.
The third section, RHETORIC and FORM, gathers papers that discuss the markers of rhetorical form.
AR/2024, Architecture and Irony is guest edited by Emmanuel Petit.
Emmanuel is author of Irony, Or, The Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture (Yale Press), and editor of Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change (Yale Press), Stanley Tigerman's Schlepping Through Ambivalence: Writings on An American Architectural Condition (Yale Press), Reckoning with Colin Rowe: Ten Architects Take Position (Routledge), Analytic Models in Architecture (Yale SoA / Actar). He was Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Yale University, the inaugural Sir Banister Fletcher Professor at the Bartlett School of UCL in London, and visiting professor at MIT, the Harvard GSD, the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne. He received his Ph.D. and Master of Arts from Princeton University, and his diploma in architecture from the ETH in Zurich. He is Principal of JEAN PETIT ARCHITECTES SA in Luxembourg-City.