ABSTRACT
Here I discuss a recent lineage of “criticality” and “post-criticality” in architecture with a focus on the American scene. Unlike in art theory, the post-critical project in architecture and the subsequent attacks on it were mostly undertaken from within the discipline itself and with regards to architectural discourse alone. Alternatively, I examine the sequence critical/post-critical/back-to-critical in relation to a number of theories formulated around the same time in the humanities and the social sciences. First, I illustrate how the theoretical schemes proposed by Sloterdijk, Žižek, Rancière, and Latour are particularly prone to being read together, and effectively displaced the very possibility of critique. Second, I show that, when pitted against that discursive backdrop, post-critical stands in architecture embodied a zeitgesty sensibility, for, even if unknowingly, some of theirs core tenets reverberated significantly with those of the critical frameworks fostered in the realm of socio-cultural theory. I then elaborate on this resonance across fields as well as how it reveals what post-critics missed. In doing so, I launch the prospect for a critical constructionism: a revised version of architectural criticality where the critical condition becomes a catalyst for the rearticulation of external spheres of perception and signification—in contrast to both the mere accommodation of those into architectural codes that post-critical attitudes favored and the fundamentally oppositional valance of traditional critical stances.
