Criticism in the New Commons

Critics of the built environment face a bleak landscape. The critic no longer enjoys either the authority granted by legacy print media publications or the imagined consensus of elite aesthetic taste. Yet when criticism abandons aesthetics altogether, it risks losing sight of its object, fixating on the context at the expense of the text. This symposium asks: How might we restore urgency to the task of criticism, to put it back into crisis and discover new forms of collective dialogue? And how might we reimagine methods of criticism that speak across dispersed and fragmented audiences? Focusing on criticism of the built environment—of which we are all stakeholders—this symposium invites critics across disciplines to ask whether, and how, acts of public-facing writing might help build a new commons.

The symposium kicks off on the evening of Thursday, October 30, with a keynote by leading theorist and scholar Hal Foster. It continues on Friday, October 31, with a morning panel featuring editors and critics situated both inside and outside of architecture. The event concludes with an afternoon workshop with practicing critics, culminating in a discussion on the future prospects for criticism.

Criticism in the New Commons is organized by Ali John Pierre Artemel, Izzy Kornblatt, David Sadighian, and Jaime Solares Carmona. Participants include Merve Emre, Hal Foster, Christopher Hawthorne, Molly Heintz, Samuel Medina, Suzanne Stephens, Kate Wagner, and Oliver Wainwright.

Symposia at the Yale School of Architecture are supported in part by the J. Irwin Miller Endowment. Criticism in the New Commons is also supported by the Whitney Humanities Center and the Brendan Gill Memorial Lectureship Fund at the School of Architecture.