Blogs vs Blueprint

Fashionably late, I can't help but comment on Tim Abrahams' "Nostalgia is No Substitute for Criticism" bizarre rant against bloggers. As a blogger myself (albeit reluctantly part time), I'm predictably going to be on their side, especially seeing as the four blogs that Abraham's picked out to name are four of my must-reads: Jonathan Bell's Things, Sam Jacob's Strange Harvest, Charles Holland's Fantastic Journal and Owen Hatherley's Sit down man....
Now these writers are all quite capable of competent ripostes themselves and it's interesting to note their typical responses. Sam Jacob simply changed his title to "Not A Valid Research Process for Architecture" - an elegantly cool and minimal nose-snub. Charles Holland and Owen Hatherley responded with posts dedicated to the rant - Holland more defending writing about the past, and Hatherley characteristically more aggressively in possibly the finest post I've read of his, attacking the point of why the future is so much better to write about anyway. Both Holland and Hatherley seem to object to the word "nostalgia" as a pejorative term, as does Bell in the introduction to a couple of posts where he accurately rebuffs contemporary architecture magazines for their role in "contemporary architecture exist[ing] to be seen, consumed via a through choice images, rather than actually experienced."

It's strange that Abrahams chose these four bloggers, as though they represented the biggest threat to a barely-read magazine like Blueprint (last audited circulation I could get was 6,453). Jonathan Bell is a successful writer in his own right, currently writing for The Morning News. Owen Hatherley has only recently become the must-have read for dead-tree format media, writing for the New Statesman, the Guardian, Building Design and probably more - I can't keep up with him. Meanwhile, Jacob's and Holland's full time jobs are architects for quite probably the UK's only current avant-garde (taking Bürger's popular definition of avant-garde theory) architectural practice, FAT. While I am guarded about architects also writing criticism (for quite Tafurian reasons), it is this aspect of them engaging in new media that interests me about them and their practice of architecture. They also write for dead-tree format journals too - Icon, the AJ and probably more.

Abraham's accusation comes in the first paragraph,

"Hitherto print journalists have had a tendency to either dismiss or overly praise their online competitors. Both of those approaches is born of fear. With this industry in tumult, the worst has already happened and we can take a long hard look at what is going on online. Here, one might think that there would at least be some optimism and some vision of the future. This is unfortunately not the case."

Blogs continue the long tradition of samizdat publishing. Free to write and free to read, there's a lot of trash out there. But there's a lot of really good, thoughtful stuff too and it requires curators like Bell with Things to help navigate it. I scan Things' links whenever it comes out, maybe click through on a handful and maybe end up reading only one or two. But I trust it. In the past, it provided me with my first accepted conference paper. And in the recent link to Naomi Stead's "The Rocket-Baroque Phase of the Icecream Vernacular" will surely form a part of a future workshop or lecture. In the archaeological discipline, there exists a snobbishness from those who re-construct the past from artefacts to those who do the same using documents, which is considered a much simpler process. With the wired world, we're moving into a third state of mediation of the real world and future archaeologists - those at the very bottom of the future status hierarchy no doubt - will be glad of the curatorship of things like Things. At worst this could be seen as a meta-mediation of the real-world - a mediation of mediation - but in reality, the online world is mediating it at the same distance as the old media, just using a different platform. So no, the digital world is not the real world, but then again neither is the old media.

It is not the job of architectural critics to project the future. That is the designers' responsibility. Critics explain, interpret, contextualise, judge, evaluate. In fact, history, theory and criticism are the holy trinity that form the godhead of architectural knowledge: "There is no criticism, only history" famously wrote Tafuri. "History is, of course, my academic discipline. Criticism is what I do for money" said Banham in the speech where he called for rigorous theory to underpin architecture in 1964. This explicit architectural knowledge is the other side of that tacit architectural knowledge of the design process - two sides of the same coin. When critics or historians project the future, they create their own architectural project and lose the distance to provide independent judgment and appraisal. Abrahams doesn't include a successful (in terms of hits) blog like Dezeen in his list of criminal blogs precisely because Dezeen offers nothing more than a PR feed. No comment, criticism or thought. It can be no more accused of nostalgia as of being interesting. It's something to keep the proles in their place, prevent them from actively thinking too much - nothing that might upset the status quo or existing hierarchy. Let us not forget that publishing is an instrument of capitalism, ultimately in the hands of the wealthy and powerful entrepreneur. It is not in their interests for this system to break. Pesky thinkers who can join a couple of words together like Hatherley are dangerous - more so when they have a not-so-hidden agenda that fails to promote the widening gap between the richest and poorest in society.

In a self-serving society where the politicians have been caught with their hands in the till and where bankers continue to cheat everyone else out of incredulously vast sums of money, demonstrating the entire political and financial systems to be corrupt, it's good to know that there are still independently minded and able critics to call our attention to the bits that the mainstream press can't or won't write about. That's the great thing about the web and about blogs. So what if they link to each other? So what if they're nostalgic (although I'll leave that to the others to argue)? They provide much-needed original content that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day. Or they can provide eye-candy if that's all you want too. And for that, may they long prosper and even multiply - in which case we'll need more curators.

Or maybe it was simply all a ruse to get some links and traffic and debate to a flagging Blueprint web site? In which case it was a quite brilliant move.