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The Function of Critique

Regarding the specific characteristics of the architecture of the commons, its critique would follow the same principles of its practice. That is because commons have been defined by a coherency of imaginative, theoretical and practical worlds. “Entire networks of affects are reproduced through the iterations of commoning. The same goes for knowledge, technology, cultures, and values. Commoning is also a way to tap into the hidden chamber within our imaginations that harbours vivid images of different ways to live, to relate, to define goals.” (De Angelis, 2017, p. 208) Commons is about the prefiguration of a different way of living and sharing, it is making of the envisioned world in the here and now. The architecture of the commons functions to provide the spaces of this prefigured world, and at the same time enables the prefiguration by imagining possible spatial configurations for and by the commoners. How the architecture of the commons is shaped and how it contributes to the commons requires critical reading. The way this critique is constructed needs to be in the domain of the commons as a reflection of the prefigurative characteristics of the commons. The commons is most and for all about the convergence of the ends and the means. The critique on the commons itself would also become a knowledge commons.

Architectural knowledge

When defining the impact of the protest movements in the 21st century, Zeynep Tüfekçi (2022) refers to the lack of organising power. According to her, the process of organising a protest was instrumental in social relationships among the organisers increasing their capacities in various ways such as making decisions and projecting towards the future of the movement. This is the strength of conventional organising versus organising through social media, in her view. People are informed about a protest via social media but there is limited knowledge generated since the organisation of the protest requires less effort, even though the bodily performance of the people takes place in real space. Knowledge generated and shared during the organisation of the protest moment would have ensured the sustainability of the movement, allowing it to contain its activities, perhaps gain more supporters, work on strategized actions, etc. In the case of organising via social media, people are informed but there is limited knowledge involved in the process.

Tüfekçi’s point of view helps us understand the difference between information and knowledge. According to the DIKW (Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom) pyramid (Wikipedia, 2023), data is a set of alphanumeric values, while information is processed data to give these values meaning. Knowledge is what we know based on various information gathered, including processed information into principles and moral values. It is the knowledge that sets people into action. Less referenced because of its ambiguous character, wisdom is about using the generated knowledge for the greater good (Rowley, 2007). While data and information are deemed objective, knowledge and wisdom are subjective and are in constant dialogue with personal ideas and ethical standpoints.

In the world of architecture, the limits of knowledge required for the practice are not clearly defined. This is in part due to external factors, either social or technological (Meeuwissen, 2003), and/or political as we see in the development of the architecture of the commons. The contemporary shift in this knowledge base can be seen in the interdisciplinary approaches, emphasizing expertise and deploying outsourcing mechanisms. On the other hand, the specificity of each architectural design and the various actors and parameters involved in the process makes it hard to draw the lines of a knowledge base for architecture, as in many other disciplines. Dwelling on the “lack of a definition of an objective knowledge base” for architecture, Jeremy Till (1997) proposes developing a critical space instead of gaining a set of information or skills. He argues that technical competence or theoretical background should mainly be considered as means, not ends, in architectural education; they would serve in generating the critical space of the individual student. However, as we had discussed in The Commons Studio: Designing Architecture of the Commons article, providing a critical lens in addition to technical and theoretical knowledge is not enough. We had argued that for engaged learning, diverse knowledge sets are necessary, which are not only new to students but also to teachers. In the case of our experience of the master dissertation studio, this knowledge was but not limited to self-organising as a studio, setting protocols for this self-organisation, installing peer-to-peer learning mechanisms, reaching out to communities in a meaningful manner (not in an instrumentalising one), interviewing civil society organisations and NGOs, challenging the existing grading system of academia. All these skill sets need a critical base to be developed on, as proposed by Jeremy Till, yet there is more work to be done for transferring and generating knowledge of and for the architecture of the commons.

Power-knowledge

Michel Foucault uses the term power-knowledge (le savoir-pouvoir). For him, power and knowledge are indistinguishable. “The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power.” (1980, p. 52). Power needs and requires to generate knowledge for its legitimacy; at the same time, the production of knowledge may generate power, which can also become a counter-power to the existing hegemony. The widely criticised and yet still dominant culture of star architecture is, in a way, proof of this power-knowledge relationship. Architecture culture has been widely occupied by designs of headquarters of big corporations or grandiose public buildings (i.e. museums and libraries), often for the marketing of cities. The knowledge accumulated in magazines, websites and architecture schools has been built on this structure of economic exchange. If we keep our focus on architectural media as one of the spaces of knowledge production, we realise that this economic power highly determined what would go in the press. The press trips paid for either by the architects or their clients attracted a group of globe-trotting journalists (Lange, 2010) to certain projects, who in turn felt the urge to publish these projects in exchange for the hospitality they received. The same is also true for architectural events, such as biennials (Kamin, 2019) and exhibitions.

If we are to look at the other side of the equilibrium of power-knowledge, economic and political power ensured a field for innovation for architects in creating new spatial experiences, materials and forms. The architectural knowledge could expand with the help of power, such as Foster and Partners’ Masdar City. Yet, how this knowledge would then become an instrument in subverting the power relations is an important question. In the case of Masdar City it is impressive to aim for a carbon-zero, sustainable architecture in the desert of Abu Dhabi, yet how this knowledge is being expanded towards general sustainability goals remains unclear. In the article An Operational Framework for an Online Community based on the Commons, Dissensus and Shared Knowledge, we discussed how commons-based peer production for sharing knowledge can contribute to society both in terms of advancing democracy and emancipation. “…online platforms function as well-organized citizens’ associations that can play an important role in helping to inform citizens and allowing people to ‘create centers of political power independent of the state’.” And through these peer-production and sharing mechanisms, knowledge can play a role in altering power relations as it becomes a power node itself.

The relationship between power and architecture knowledge reminds us of Manfredo Tafuri’s position on the impossibility of an architectural utopia (1977). He argues that architecture and its knowledge would always be in service of the dominant power relations, and thinking and doing otherwise would be impossible. For Tafuri, mostly relying on the critical theory of capitalism, architecture can never be instrumentalised to alter capitalism since all its knowledge is derived from it. Architecture has no effect in altering the existing power relations, whoever practices architecture is bound to reproduce, if not strengthen this power. Even though, the reasoning behind Tafuri’s pessimism is understandable, it is not hundred percent accurate, because there are critical practices that tackle the inevitability of power, such as Forensic Architecture and their spatial researches on human right violations. We situate the architecture of the commons under these critical practices. In the same vein, the production of knowledge commons itself can also be considered a critical practice in itself.

Critique and its function for architectural knowledge

Critique is crucial in understanding the power-knowledge relationship, to alter it even if knowledge will never able to totally free from power. Critique serves to question our knowledge and also its limitations rooted in its relation to power. For Foucault (2019), critique is “the art of not being governed so much.” It is a resistance to the normative reading of the world one is embedded in, rather than fault-finding. In her reading of Foucault’s critique, Judith Butler (2002) emphasises the double function of critique: “So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands.” At this breaking point, one can find the transformative aspect of critique. By defining the breaking point, critique has the potential to meet the demand of being governed less, or of being governed in another way.

Critique can manifest itself in two distinct ways: critical reflection and critical practice (Messner & Jordan, 2004). Even though the borders between these two are vague and mostly trespassed on both sides, this kind of distinction will serve us to understand the scales of operability. In architecture, critical (spatial) practice is the making of projects that question the spatial production mechanisms and architecture’s relation to society, while critical reflection is called architecture criticism that is mostly published in newspapers, magazines and books, “a feedback mechanism after the fact.” (Oosterman, 2013, p.101).

In the second part, under the title of What is Architecture of the Commons? we argued that architecture of the commons is a critical (spatial) practice, so here I will keep the focus on critical reflection, namely architecture criticism and its function for architectural knowledge. According to Markus Miessen, critical practice replaced architectural criticism in recent years, he signifies a shift from verbal to practiced criticism. However, this argument may seem like a factual reading of our contemporary architectural culture, it is not possible for the critical practice to replace critical reflection, mostly because they are anachronistic. Critical practice is about doing, making and acting, it occurs during the time of the event or the fact. Critical reflection is about thinking, judging and commenting on what has been thought of and/or made, it occurs after the presentation of an idea, or a fact. Instead of a replacement, one can talk about the emergence of critical practices (or rather the categorisation of some practices as critical), and the decline of critical reflection. There are countless articles (Pawley, 2007; Fisher, 2011; Quirk, 2012; Slessor, 2013; Kamin, 2015) on the death of architectural criticism, most of which connect this phenomenon to the general post-critical tendency in social and cultural spheres. As Douglas Spencer puts it very vividly “After dying so many deaths, the spectre of critique haunts the world of the living in ever more strange forms.” (2021, p. 18) While he lists critical practices and falls into the same anachronistic trap as Miessen, some others consider the emergence of social media (Zieger, 2013) as a way to redistribute the authority of the critic.

So what is the function of criticism for architectural knowledge? Long-time architecture critic of the New York Times Paul Goldberger (2003), well-known for his appraisal of star architecture, claims that “the purpose of architecture criticism in the general media is to create a better educated, more critically aware, more visually literate constituency for architecture, and thus, presumably, increase society’s demand for good design”. For him, criticism is an educative process, mainly serves to convince the general public about the value of “good” architecture so that they demand it, and then “good” architects would respond to this demand. In this perspective, this process does not feedback to architectural knowledge and has no effect on the transformation of the profession or the wider environment in which architecture is practiced. Far from Foucault’s reading of critique as a tool to question the legitimacy of the power-knowledge, Goldberger’s argument is based on criticism as a celebration of “good” architecture. Yet, this approach “prevents the construction of a thorough body of knowledge on those works and sterilizes debate by killing autonomous thinking and its expression” (Fromonot, 2013, p.14). The creation of this thorough body of knowledge is the precondition for criticism. For Spencer (n.d.), to go beyond what is seen, one needs to search into the production mechanisms of architecture, investigation into material resources, labour conditions, financial structures, and how the building in the end serves people (which people) and how its realisation relates to capital. In the article A Performative Reading of Architecture of the Commons, we discussed how the lack of critique is problematic for the architecture of the commons. Mostly related to its performative characteristics, in cases when the architectures of the commons are covered, we generally encounter an appraisal or celebration of the project, without thoroughly discussing the real issues and challenges of the commons or the community. As par to the prefigurative characteristics of the commons, of its attempt to make real a world imagined in the here and now, the discourse generated on the architecture of the commons is prefigurative. Yet, this attitude prevents criticism and does not allow the generation of thorough knowledge on projects of the architecture of the commons.

Knowledge commons

As a shared resource, a knowledge commons is generated by a community based on certain protocols. The creation process of these protocols and the formation of the community cannot be detached from power and critique. According to Wikipedia, one of the well-known examples of knowledge commons, “The term ‘knowledge commons’ refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet.” Following her research on natural resources Elinor Ostrom, together with Charlotte Hess (2007) explored the field of knowledge commons. According to them, this field requires a different type of perspective in regard to natural commons. After Ostrom’s passing, Charlotte Hess kept researching this field, which she later defined as “new commons”. “The new commons ‘movement’ is charged with electrical currents beckoning citizens of the world to develop new forms of self-governance, collaboration, and collective action.” (2008). With this, she refers to both the local actions, global movements and digital reflection of communing practices. Knowledge commons is a political endeavour (self-governance), a productive undertaking (collaboration) and a realisation (collective action). She lists cultural, knowledge, medical and health, neighbourhood, infrastructure, traditional, global commons, and markets as commons under the umbrella of new commons.

Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2019) join the discourse on separating knowledge commons from natural commons with regard to the notions of depletability and rivalrous use. As opposed to natural resources knowledge can not be used up, if one person consults that knowledge, this action does not consume the resource. It is even favoured that knowledge is shared by many people since its accumulation is more possible via sharing. In most cases, especially in the digital sphere, one’s consultation on a specific knowledge resource does not prevent another person to access this resource, so there is no rivalry in the community. Yet these features of non-depletability and non-rivalrous use do not mean that knowledge by definition is a commons. It needs to be protected from enclosures. With the advance of the internet, one of the biggest struggles against the enclosure of the commons has been occurring in the intellectual property domain. For example, US intellectual property law “protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture”. Generating a knowledge commons is met most of the time with the challenge of intellectual property (copyright) laws. Yet there are other intellectual property arrangements, such as open-source publishing, Creative Commons licensing, and copyleft. As collaboration protocols, with these arrangements, the work produced is open for appropriation, in some of the licenses it is even available for commercial use as long as it is not subjected to enclosure. These open-source protocols have made possible the development and maintenance of many software programs and the web in general.

According to Pier Vittorio Aureli (2012), “Architecture can only exist as shared thus common knowledge”. He emphasises that any architectural project realised today is made possible by the experiences of past construction techniques, material knowledge and so on. The discipline of architecture is rather a collective effort than an expression of individual geniuses. Opposed to “the protection of original works of authorship” as mentioned in the US intellectual property law, this statement acknowledges the impossibility of an original project. All architectural production, like in many other (artistic) disciplines, relies on the knowledge produced and accumulated over time across geographies. Yet, as in other forms of knowledge, the reality of architectural knowledge being collectively produced doesn’t automatically allow us to define it as a commons. We can spot many architecture websites today, yet, it is not possible to frame none of them as knowledge commons. The sharing of knowledge and abundance of data is not to be confused. Archdaily is a website that publishes projects from all over the world. Its modus operandi is based on architects uploading their projects. From a gigantic development project in China to a little cabin in Argentina, all the projects with various approaches to design are all listed in the same manner, with photographs and project descriptions delivered by the architects. It is possible to search in the database projects per country, typology, date, architect, etc. This database is useful for knowledge commons, since it can provide a basis for critical reading, yet in itself, it is not a commons. On the other hand, Failed Architecture, also a website for architecture, publishes critical articles about architecture. They produce lengthy texts on contemporary architecture, urban planning and spatial practices. Headquartered in the Netherlands, they have three satellite bases in New York, Bogota and Istanbul that allow them to gather local knowledge. As opposed to Archdaily, Failed Architecture does not base its content on the press releases of architects, but on local critics. The network of satellite bases, always with one or two persons defined as organisers, also helps them evaluate the incoming articles on local conditions. Failed Architecture is a critical website on architecture and its content is highly moderated and controlled by its editors. The entry-level of information is high, so the production and consumption of knowledge in Failed Architecture are by and for a group of people, probably commonly architects, planners and people from adjacent disciplines. Even if for a select group or a tight community, it is not possible to name Failed Architecture as a knowledge commons since the protocols of sharing the resources (such as time and money) are not clearly defined and not open for appropriation by the community of knowledge producers because of its hierarchical character.

Stavros Stavrides (2022) claims that there can be no community that is not related to land. However, he does not specify whether this land could also be virtual. One of the most frequently given examples of digital knowledge commons, Wikipedia has its own community, that produces, reproduces and maintains the knowledge commons. Not bound to a specific land, online communities operate globally. Yet this kind of landless digital knowledge commons (or global knowledge commons) and local knowledge commons do not converge in most cases. In a further study, Charlotte Hess mentions that “…the relationship between local, indigenous knowledge and more globalised forms of knowledge is poorly understood.”

Architectural knowledge is both local and global, in the sense that its process of realisation is dependent on the land it is prefigured for, yet its methods and technics of production can be based on or transferred to global knowledge. This divergence in “scale, scope and relation” in the commons is defined as “uncommons” by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (2017). Their departure point is the neo-extractivist policies in South America and their implications on different communities. The interests of indigenous communities who have access to natural resources that are being contaminated by extraction, and the wider population of the nation which may benefit from the international trade of extracted materials are different and it is not possible to converge this difference. What is perceived as the effect of architecture in the daily lives of people living in proximity of the project and the same project’s global recognition can be divergent. It is one of the challenges of generating and sustaining knowledge commons for architecture. As touched upon in Post-truth in Architecture Media article, dissensus is one way to approach this challenge. By allowing the making of a bricolage of truths, dissensus-based knowledge commons production offers various information sets to co-exist, diverge and converge when necessary.

Critique and knowledge commons

The function of critique for architectural knowledge commons is to challenge the relationship between power and knowledge. This occurs by the constant feedback between practice and its reflection. Architecture of the commons as a critical practice needs to be critically reflected on to trigger change. As discussed by Judith Butler (2002) in her reading of Foucault, challenging the relationship between knowledge and power is possible and may bring the field to a breaking point, after which change occura. One of the ways to reach this moment is to expand “the limits of our most sure ways of knowing”. A redefined knowledge field would force power to redefine its relationship with knowledge and, hence would reach the breaking point. In the process of challenging power-knowledge, two attitudes come forward in terms of architectural production: expanding the limits of knowing and peer-production of knowledge.

Expanding the knowledge in terms of architecture would mean the collection of various information on how that project came into being on paper and/or in real. Françoise Fromonot’s (2013) plea for the generation of a thorough body of knowledge on an architectural project and Douglas Spencer’s (n.d.) plea for investigating the possible exploitive conditions behind architectural projects are very similar in the way that they call for the expansion of the knowledge field. It requires a comprehensive reading of many elements and actors making the project possible, from material resources to labour conditions, from the inclusion of stakeholders to environmental impact. Mostly dependent on local knowledge, it is through this multiple-faceted reading that one can understand the social, economic and political circumstances, namely power relations, that interact with architectural production. There are many questions to be answered, about the method of commissioning of the architect, their engagement in the project and its context, the working conditions of the architects and construction workers, the environmental and social footprint of the production and logistics of building materials, etc. Through this expansion of architectural knowledge, by going beyond more common ways of critique based on spatial experience, formal historical reading or urban politics (Lange, 2012), the regime of truth can be challenged.

Peer-production of knowledge plays an important role in this expansion. The multiplicity of voices, including inputs about architecture from people who are not embedded in the practice, can offer an external perspective and insightful reflection. Knowledge commons requires a peer production of knowledge, open also to people who are not architects by training or practice. The “educational” aspect of the architectural critique, as desired by Goldberger (2003), then is altered into an active production of knowledge instead of passively being exposed to it. The relationship between the authority of the single architectural critique and its mass waiting to be “educated” is challenged, and its dialectics broken. Challenging power relations through the realisation and generation of such a thorough body of knowledge with multiple voices can, in time, become a transformative practice through which architecture as a profession reinvents itself and its limits. As a critical practice in itself, architectural knowledge commons also requires a critical reflection as an embedded approach in its production. This requires various angles, in-depth local information, multiple voices and new protocols for authorship.