Alternative Architectures | Alternative Practices

GEORGE DODDS University of Tennessee

Editorial
Alterity j Alternative

The theme of this issue is timely for several reasons, not the least of which is the rise of researchoriented and design-build based architectural practices. What was once solely the province of boutique offices, often with at least one partner affiliated with academe, or stand-alone summer workshops focused on largely pre-industrial building practices, is becoming increasingly mainstream. Most schools of architecture now offer some form of design-build course as part of their curriculum as a new generation of students clamors, at once, for greater access to analog construction-for-credit while simultaneously demanding a full range of digital practices. The American Institute of Architects Latrobe Prize is further testament to this trend in professional practice. The 2009 competition seeks design research proposals that go beyond invention to innovation: to Change that Matters. While the prize largely honors application-based research, it leaves the door open to inquiry that is more speculative. The Latrobe, in its short life span, has become to the research-oriented practitioner what the Pritzker Prize is to the professions international population. Another change that matters greatly to this journal: this is the last of the JAEs quarterly issues. Beginning with our next volume year, we will no longer publish four issues per year (September, November, February, May). Rather we will move to a twice-yearly schedule (October and March). We will, however, publish the same annual number of pages, if not more. The reasons for this change are many. Chief among them is our intent to offer an increasingly distracted readership two more sizeable (and hopefully substantial) issues of the journal at a delivery time better suited to academic

schedules. This biannual cycle also aligns with the ACSAs regional and national conference schedules in the autumn and spring respectively. Hence, the JAE will be posted online and soon after arrive in subscriber hands immediately preceding these conferences.The desired effect is that by publishing more, less often, and in a more timely fashion, the journal will become more visible and useful to its expanding readership. From the first discussions about this final quarterly theme issue, long before the paper session Alternative Architectures j Alternative Practices that Jori Erdman and I co-moderated at the ACSAs 2008 national conference, the theme editors and several of that sessions participants began to take umbrage with the term alternative. In retrospect, the reasons are manifold, perhaps best demonstrated by a Google search for alternative practices. This search yields over 2.5 million hits, ranging from the technical to the mercurial, therapeutic to pathological, R & B to S & M. There was a tacit acknowledgment among the paper session participants and this theme issues editors of the often-facile dichotomy between the normative and the alternative. It is inevitable that many current alternative practices will become tomorrows best practices, and that many of todays innovative solutions will not sustain future challenges. If one accepts that normative and alternative are not so much opposites as they are apposites, then a different sort of dialogue emerges. One can embrace the out-of-the-norm without constructing a false alterity.The design-based and textbased articles, in addition to the Op Arch and Review essays of Buildings 1 Projects in this issue, explore a wide array of responses to this nuanced

conundrum. The theme editors describe this body of work well in their Introduction, requiring no elaboration on my part. My concern is broader, focusing on the relation of alternative modes of practice to the life of the mind in academe and the profession. Some have equated many alternative architectural practices with the death of architectural theory. In response to this provocation, Joseph Rykwert, in his lecture Who Needs Architectural Theory Anyway?, explains that, as one engages in architectural production, one chooses to be either cognizant or ignorant of the theories and histories that underlie ones actions. Alternative practices, and by extension alternative architectures, demonstrate neither the death nor the uselessness of architectural theory. If anything, they help expand the parameters of theoretical and critical discourse in the discipline of practice and the practice of our discipline. For virtually all architectural theory has been produced as a reflection upon what one designs and builds. Moreover, theory has long been the architects response to questions or problems not fully answered by design and building alone. Hence, while several treatises and manifestoes have been calls to arms, in most cases it is only later that theory becomes the predicate of architectural action. An inevitable confusion arises when one conflates the production of theory with its enactment, conscious or not. Alternative practices and alternative architectures offer no alternative to the life of the mind. They are not alternatives to being a reflective practitioner. They are not alternatives to knowingly engaging theory, criticality, and the alternative histories that comprise our common goals.

EDITORIAL

Journal of Architectural Education, p. 3 2009 ACSA