"Pigeon-holing Made Difficult," Architectural Design (January 1969), Vol 11, 582.
Ibid. Kahn, Venturi, Moore, Giurgola, Belluschi, Cambridge 7, Sert, Esherick, Kallmann, Barnes, Johansem, Breuer, Neutra, Nowicki, Eames, Waschmann, Fuller, Kiesler, Soleri, Greene, Goff, Wright, Lundy, Gropius, Stubbins, Rudolph, Saarinen, Johnson, I.M.Pei, Mies, SOM, Yamasaki, Stone, Harrison. Jencks explains that each value represents the degree of dissimilarity between two architects calculated by summing the 0-3 scores related to six historical influences, producing a possible minimum of 0 and maximum of 18. Each pairing appears twice as the intersection between Paolo Soleri’s column and SOM’s row is located in a different cell than the intersection between SOM’s column and Soleri’s row, yet they both hold the same value. The matrix is however diagonally divided from the upper left corner to the lower right one, cancelling the cells that show the intersection of the architects with themselves, and reserving the bottom-left triangle for numerical values and the top right for grey shades whose saturation is equivalent to the corresponding numerical value – darker colours denote higher values denote greater distance. Jencks cites his Numerical Taxonomy source from which he appropriated the matrix, Robert R. Sokal, "Numerical Taxonomy," Scientific American, Vol 215, no 6 (December, 1966), 106-117, 106.
Friedrich A. Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Redwood City: Stanford University press, 2004).
We are reminded that it is only by the utter denial of other criteria, of properties that cannot or will not be measured (yet), that a system can propound to be a ’world’ for which, as with all world-building, the final goal is to be hermetic – to exclude not only that/those which it cannot/will not measure, but also its/their futures.
See Sokal, "Numerical Taxonomy," Scientific American. Sokal offers, we can still ‘see’ the phenetic distance, or dissemblance, between individuals via a phenogram – a branching diagram, deceptively like its antecedents, but fundamentally different: the x-axis is no longer time but degrees of difference. Time is gone. 109.
"Organizing Tendencies: Charles Jencks and Alejandro Zaera-Polo Compare Diagrams," produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and filmed in Cosmic House, December 2017, 11:37 mins, ➝.
Not unlike the tolerance of complexity that numerical taxonomy had promised, with its incorporation of a near infinite number of characters in giant matrices, allowing the taxonomist to make, as Jencks hoped, “more delicate” classifications, spreadsheets too have instead produced not a space for the articulation of difference promised by computation, but the homogeneity that is the signature of mediocrity. Charles Jencks, "Pigeon-holing Made Difficult," 582.
Recent research on the performance of medical and law schools has established that they produce better learning environments and better research when they are managed by their own discipline, by academics interested in the pursuit of knowledge rather than managers interested in the pursuit of profit. For a brief account of the relations between transactional logics, and the metricisation they require, and the rise of mediocrity in architectural academia see Francesca Hughes, "Failing to Fail," The Architectural Review, no.1494, (September, 2022), 96-98.
We are indebted to our dear friend and colleague Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas for pointing this out to us.
On extreme centre see David Graeber, "Graeber on Liberals," Double Down News, 2020, ➝.
On dysphoria see Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi: Le son du monde qui s’écroule (Paris, Bernard Grasset: 2022).
We’d like to than Janelle Woo for her inestimable help with compiling the Definitions. We hope they have not put her, or you, off academia for good.