Editorial: Re-Precedented

GEORGE DODDS University of Tennessee

Twenty-five years ago The Harvard Architectural Review (HAR) published a signpost issue, ‘‘Precedent and Invention,’’ in which precedent was valorized as a precondition to reasonable interrogations of architectural production. For the authors in the issue, the question was not whether or not to engage with precedent, but rather which, and to what degree. Work on the ‘‘Precedent and Invention’’ issue began over three years before its publication, with an open ‘‘Competition for a Gate,’’ to Harvard University, the brief of which was written by the editors. The winning entries were to be published in the issue, along with comments by an invited jury. As stated in the original brief: ‘‘The focus of this competition will be the exploration of precedent and invention and their relationship to the process of design. . . . How do designers today search out and use precedent?’’ In an effort to answer this question, 311 entries were judged by an impressive jury: Henry Cobb, Edward Jones, Laurie Olin, Jaquelin Robertson, Stanley Tigerman, Susanna Torre, and Anthony Vidler. The jury members reviewed the entries in a public forum at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The issue begins with a transcript of the jury’s comments on 18 of the designs, including the premiated entries, noting the limitations and aspirations of the varied schemes. The juror’s insights on the winning scheme are telling. As with many of the entries, Thomas Bartels’ winning design demonstrated a key sensitivity to the strictures of Cornell Contextualism. Showing no more than a figure-ground of his proposed new footprint (accompanied by an abundance of text), Olin groused about the scheme’s absence of any architectural specifics.1 Conversely, Cobb was satisfied that the designer made clear that the ‘‘urban issue’’ was the real problem to be solved.2 Tigerman mused: One always finds in a competition the sort of ultimate rule-breakers. This one offers a way of

Editorial Re-precedented

not rejecting a gate per se, but reidentifying the condition around which the gate was to address certain specifics – the juncture of town and gown, the memory of [Harvard] Yard and its origination, and so forth.3 Vidler concludes that the value of the winning entry was in the designer’s critique of the competition’s premise: ‘‘What do you mean ‘a competition for a gate?’ The gate is already there.’’ Hence, the winning entry to the Harvard gate competition (which became a quasi frontispiece for the entire issue) demonstrated that the precedent for this particular invention was the existing urban fabric of Quincy Street; the invention was the precedent of Harvard Yard. And so to answer their own question as to how designers choose precedent in the process of design, the editors of issue number 5 of The Harvard Architectural Review published the work of designers attempting to do just that, augmented by the critical context of juror comments. Among the authors in the issue was Colin Rowe, who managed to remain above the fray by submitting a ‘‘letter to the editors,’’ rather than an article. His letter was published as a coda to the issue, and sums up well the premise of the several authors. Rowe begins by stipulating that he considers the entire enterprise of questioning the role of precedent in architectural invention, or any means of human making, a perfunctory enterprise. ‘‘I can never begin to understand how it is possible to attack or to question the use of precedent. Indeed, I am not able to comprehend how anyone can begin to act (let alone to think) without resorting to precedent.’’4 Rowe’s letter is a three-act-play. In the first he adumbrates several rhetorical, albeit highly effective ‘‘painfully obvious and banal. . .propositions,’’ which he follows by invoking the authority of Aristotle and William Wordsworth (on mimesis). In the final act, he quotes Walter Gropius’ ‘‘perverse and inhibiting’’ aphorism that design students have

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an inherent ‘‘urge to play,’’ albeit without ‘‘copying.’’5 Rowe counters Gropius’ doctrinaire modernist line (invention free of mimesis), concluding (in agreement with Huizinga): ‘‘all play is essentially the celebration of precedent.’’6 To conclude, Rowe shifts his focus to ‘‘the role of invention in architecture today,’’ invoking the craft of jurisprudence as a counterbalance of sorts to the unrestrained play of Gropius’ architect acting free of pre-existing models. Imagining a lawyer toiling in a library limned in leather-bound case law, Rowe posits: This is the inventory of cases bearing upon the specific case that he is required to judge. So simply to pronounce a legal innovation, to discriminate the new, our jurist is obliged to consult the old and the existing; and it is only by reference to these that genuine innovation can be proclaimed. For are not precedent and invention the opposite sides of the same coin? I think a better topic might have been: How does the new invade the old and how does the old invade the new?7 The ‘‘Precedent and Invention’’ issue of the Harvard Architectural Review remains instructive. Its editors believed that they were writing on the cusp of what was, in retrospect, perhaps the coda of an era. The same may be said about this issue of the JAE. The knowledge that that which has passed is prologue to future actions offers little comfort to those who must daily answer the questions of how to frame the past, which past do we examine, and to what end? Absent an explicit canon, the questions begin to weigh, one upon the other, further compressing Gropius’ vision of a designer at play without a model, much like a character in a play who enters the stage without a script. Working under the theme of ‘‘Beyond Precedent,’’ the theme editors of this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education tacitly respond to Rowe’s questions, culling articles for this issue that

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variously situate the relation of precedent and invention in the productive task of the architect. The authors in this issue explore how can ‘‘the new invade the old and how does the old invade the new.’’ In so doing, we are reminded that Aristotle, whom Rowe invoked as one of his three authorities, spoke of both bad and good mimesis. The former is little more than the simple mimicking of form, the reappearance of the familiar. The latter echoes not the forms of life, but rather the life of forms—provocations to action and settings in which human action can dwell. Since the rise of history and theory in schools of architecture in the 1970s and early 1980s, in many academic design studios, the use of precedent has become pro forma—as ubiquitous as it is often perfunctory, much like the ancient Romans who enacted Etruscan ceremonies using a long dead language that no one understood. But the ritual remained. Marc Neveu and Saundra Weddle set their sights beyond the rote and ritualistic, interrogating the situatedness of precedent, its efficacy, and its limits. For as Rowe cautioned, precedent is little more, and nothing less, than the verso to the recto of invention.

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The theme of this issue, which looks forward as much as looks backwards, seems an appropriate topic with which to conclude my editorship of the JAE. As much has been practicable, the four volumes of the JAE for which I have been responsible have focused on the productive activities of the architect—repositioning the JAE toward a readership that readily and regularly engages in the discursive enterprise of architectural design. This is the core readership of this journal; as such it has been our primary focus. This re-focusing comes at a cost. Architecture has long been ill at home in universities that value, at one end of the spectrum the highly fundable and instrumental sciences, and at the other spectral end, post-dissertation studies in the humanities. Toward this end we changed the JAE nomenclature from ‘‘scholarly articles’’ and ‘‘design articles,’’ to ‘‘scholarship of design,’’ and ‘‘design as scholarship.’’ This change was not intended to further narrow the field, but rather to invite a broader discourse about the nature of design as a scholastic medium, and to better situate architectural discourse, in its varied forms, within the academy. Design faculty are engaged in an academic enterprise, which is often distant from conventional

notions of scholarship. Indeed, the idea that architectural educators would see in their own design explorations, or those of the students they direct, works of scholarship, may continue to seem foreign to many. Moreover, it is fair and necessary to distinguish between ‘‘research’’ and ‘‘scholarship.’’ While all scholarship requires research, not all research is scholarship. It is also fair to say that during the past four years, the JAE has published both. And while the ‘‘scholarship of design’’ articles have tended to privilege questions of precedent, the ‘‘design as scholarship’’ articles have sided with the nettlesome problems of invention, albeit in relation to a larger field of operation. In the best of these, authors and designers have explored the interrelationship of precedent and invention—and now, beyond precedent. Notes 1. ‘‘Beyond Precedent,’’ Harvard Architectural Review 5 (1986): 47. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid, p. 188 5. Ibid, p. 189 6. Ibid. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 7. ‘‘Beyond Precedent,’’ p. 189.