ABSTRACT
The practice of architecture in the early twenty-first century has assumed a ‘post-critical’ posture. The criticality against which contemporary practitioners position themselves is not analytical judgment broadly speaking, but rather a specific moment in architectural history associated with critical theory and aesthetic inquiry. Post-critical architects revel in critical thinking, but they do so with intent to engage the lived reality of the built environment, shunning vanguard notions of architecture-about-architecture and mandating instead interdisciplinary exchanges rooted in emerging technologies and socioeconomic criteria. This chapter strives to re-envision a role for aesthetic intention in architectural practice alongside pragmatic intelligence. It differs from other responses to the post-critical in its emphasis of the always-already dialectical and ethical nature of practices that produce the built environment. It is not a theory, but rather a mode of spatial thinking that confronts both the value and the impossibility of a harmonious balance between autonomy and engagement. Our notion of the After Critical is an attempt to lay bare and demystify the design process in a manner that renders theory not only irrelevant, but also counterproductive. The After Critical is a philosophy’not an application of philosophy onto architecture, but rather a philosophy of architecture.
