Reading #2: The Muses are not Amused

I was promised to be irratated reading "The Muses are not Amused" by Jorge Silvetti. However, with my mind pre-blown, I think it failed to fully live up to the hype. Though it is meant to be provocative and garner a sharp rebuttal, I actually agree with the central point which is, that recently, architects try to pass off the 'authorship' of form in the search of rigor. This search for the grounding of form-making into some deeper apparatus: data (or worse, the representation of data), software, history, or metaphor, is widely implemented, and Silvetti simply exposes it as a cold fish, a tangental path away from the real thing. While this may be a fair criticism, I think it is mostly a framing problem and not a process problem. While these architects focus on their project's connections to sci-fi movies or claim that they are more 'chemical engineer than designer', the implicit and more direct connections back to form-making are still there, just not articulated. The tendency to remove authorship is only dangerous when it is coupled with some claim to perfection. When Joshua Prince-Ramus claims that seattle public library (a supreme example of Programism) is a completely rational structure, that it only works in its final configuration, he takes it too far. Instead, this technique should be treated like a blindfold exercise, if the results are useful, go with it.

Willfullness or "intuition" will always be part of the architect's process, but sometimes it lies deeper than putting pencil to paper. In computer science, the programmer is constancely weighing algorithms against other algorithms that produce the same result: while one is faster, it is also more memory intensive, etc. Here, intuition lies in the negotiation of these factors. Architects encounter similar issues all the time: an optimal use of materials may not be cost effective, a structural system may conflict with spatial configuration. This is where the muse comes in, the metaphor or the computer program or history may help you answer seemingly arbitrary questions as well as intuitive conflicts.