Brick By Brick

As I see it, one of the special and primary challenges to architectural criticism is that it is addressing something with public and private, artistic and functional, attributes. The degree to which these attributes may be stressed varies, but their dualities are ever-present. What can often arise is a kind of criticism which is expressing a scopophilic relationship between author and subject wherein one fails to appreciate a bigger, public, and more interactive picture. One might pass by a housing complex each day and find it unbearably dreary, yet to speak of it as such and leave it at that does not account for how that place may function for its inhabitants, for example, or what its situational context is. To strike back at this approach by adopting a taste-omitting stance which invisibilizes oneself, as Kate Wagner does in this 2018 piece for Common Edge, is equally unrevealing. Architecture is a creative venture and cannot be reduced to a question of whether it just does one thing or another, as if its problematics were fixed, or as if aesthetic concerns were all equivalent to an élite sentimentality about appropriate civic attire. Again, I would stress the matter’s specialness: it is trickier to handle than disliking or liking a song another person likes or dislikes. Just as it is impossible to capture the totality of any one building in a photograph, it may too be impossible to express the totality of what any one building is or may be in any piece of criticism.

The fate of most buildings, in terms of our subjective experience of them, is to be ambient things we walk past or through. Ironically, the closer we are to these things, the more unaware we may become of their particularities. Time regularizes, normalizes, immunizes. That bedroom in your new apartment will never again feel the way it does during that first week or two. As with parts of our body, we tend to take note of a local building only if it is experiencing distress or maintenance. Otherwise, the noteworthy building tends to have an associational prestige: we are told that it is somehow important, or that important people live or once lived there; or the architecture is flavored by the location’s “historical” ambience. The Opéra Garnier is as remarkable to the foreigner for its richness of detailing as its siting within an arrondissement of Paris. As with so much other art, then, our awareness of exceptional or interesting buildings tends to be predefined, touristic, and spectacular. The point I mean to make relates back to the first form of scopophilic criticism: such criticism is indeed inadequate, yet it would be expressing our primary experiences of architecture, which is as dimensional facades whose interiors and qualifications we simply have no reason or time to acquaint ourselves with (and, indeed, many of these buildings’ totalities would be off-limits to us anyway). I am not sure than that it can be entirely discounted.

John Summerson makes a deft and enduring observation in his essay “The Mischievous Analogy”: “The fact is that the whole idea of formal assembly in public has withered; and with it has gone the need for an architecture reflecting that collective sentiment which goes with the love of formal assembly.” This essay is a mid-20th century publication, but points like this get closer to matters’ cores than, for instance, the appealing and persistent falsehood that what architecture has globally lacked since the World Wars is localized flavors of state- or national-level identity. More crow-stepped gables in a Belgian city’s downtown center may half-sate certain persons’ longing for a forever frozen cultural timeframe, but that is all. These falsehoods have lead to, for example, architects and developers in my city of residence, Boston, insisting such-and-such a project proposal is aesthetically and situationally substantiated through exterior use of brickwork. Whether these professionals truly believe the connection exists and is meaningful is irrelevant; it taps into and feeds a popular residential story of Boston having been built in brick.

Anyway, some of what Summerson is referring to is the ongoing primacy of the automobile as transportation (an expression of modernity’s individualism), the privileged allocation of space for that technology, and the marginalization of the biker and pedestrian (to refer to Boston again, I would note that the failure of its City Hall is not the building but the plaza, undergoing a redesign at the moment, which was imagined as a space for demonstration below eyes of governance). What we are faced with now is also the primacy of the mobile phone which occupies one’s attention. All those banal political cartoons depicting a loss of awareness and spontaneous communication as persons become more tethered to cyberspace’s beckonings are often disregarded as overreaction, but can we discount the entire criticism as mere technophobia because one can, say, find an old photo of every person on a train car reading a newspaper? If people are paying even less attention to their surroundings now (and they are), the posited crises of architecture as a craft of artful problem solving acquire a new vividness. One not only should but must ask why architecture should attempt to command visual experience of public urban space when today’s architecture exists more as a symptom of culture than as an aspiration of culture. As Summerson writes in the same essay, “…we do not really care to be reminded by the grand staircase of the majesty and greatness of Mr. Mayor. […] Architecture is no longer required to give symbolic cohesion to society. Cohesion is now maintained by new methods of communication.”

For the sake of readers who are unfamiliar, I want to give a very short, generalized overview of the architectural profession’s trajectory over the past two centuries, because it will help to establish my next points. It is inaccurate to say that the twentieth century stands alone in its cultural crises. Artforms have long been in danger of mutation, indirection, or obsolescence, and there have always been battles to protect the existence and sanctity of one thing or another as such. In the west, the most consistently transformative factor has been the march of technology; but it is only since the industrial revolution and its democratizations (some would say infrastructural impositions) that the pace of this march has accelerated so quickly that the turnover rate of things and ideas has created an anxiety of profound self-consciousness about one’s own relevance and relationship to time. Now if we turn to the practice of architecture (which only emerged as a sober and specified profession in the 1800s), a significant crisis occurred with the advent of the engineer who worked with new materials, assisted in the application of novel urban forms such as suspension bridges, railways, and industrial buildings, and whose ultimate goal was cost-efficient practicality. This crisis happened in tandem with architects’ debate over the suitability of one preexisting or composite style over another. Not one of these crises has ever quite resolved. What I want to pinpoint is that the domain of engineering diminished the architect as a copyist peddler of veneers. The forming and evolutions of what we very broadly categorize as Modern Architecture are partly explainable as the results of certain architects moving past that exact debate of styles and matching the engineer’s competence.

Of course, modern architecture has had its failures (and victories). One might say that with its overconfident rationalism it too highly venerated the engineer’s tenets, and so dehumanized not only the citizen but itself. More important to this essay than that evaluation is the implication of the profession’s post-debate fear of style. Architects today I think are all too aware that to formally label a contemporary architecture is to date it and so possibly give it premature expiration. Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid’s designs might often express identifiable looks, but neither architect ever gave these looks a name. This is in extreme contradistinction to the obsession early-20th artists and activists had with affixing an -ism to everything they made or did. Architecture is no longer an end in itself; it is for the most part a relational capitalistic commodity, and one will invariably sooner hear keywords such as “carbon footprint”, “natural light”, or “environmental quality” than anything about what the building artistically is. This is not a personal judgment: it is a plain matter of fact. In some sense, then, the battle of styles has not disappeared but changed: the architect’s battle is a praxis-centered staving off of categorical identification; meanwhile, it is the critic (professional and unprofessional) who bandies words of blatant stylistic content with others to cast blame or approval.

The relevance, or irrelevance, of the architectural critic now somewhat parallels that 19th-century tension between architect and engineer. While the critic tends to speak in one language, the architect tends to speak in another (if at all). Given this disparity, it is understandable that some critics would find difficulty or resist bringing in the question of the aesthetics. This difficulty extends to the architectural profession’s scattered makeup. It is very rare that one has a clear picture of how an architectural firm (including its assistants, technicians, associate/senior directors, etc.), designers, engineers, developers, and the various building codes and zoning laws have interacted to realize a building. Even if the road one takes to become an architect has been codified (the free-form course of, say, Inigo Jones’ career could seem absurd to us today), its complexities have exploded, and integrating these into a coherent assessment of a building is practically impossible. The details of the coming about of a building now, no matter how mundane its appearance, could occupy the page-count of a novel. Not all data is information, though, and one could declare: damn the behind-the-doors bureaucracy – what matters is the end product! Yet we could just as well retort: matters how? and to whom? It is one thing to declare architecture’s basic provisional import; it is another to say (as I have tried to in the past) that it need be important in the ways we wish for it to be, and to make this the argumentative totality.

Further complicating everything is the reality that architectural criticism, like any other critical tradition, has been undermined by those aforementioned democratizations. With the Internet, anyone can (and is encouraged to) be a critic with an equal shot at a platform and audience. Such criticism tends to spread by the infectious power of anger or smug sarcasm rather than the quality of its insights. This sort of criticism prefers to deal in charged language yet tells little: it is a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway. Criticism is also an objectified aggregate, seen on sites such as Metacritic, making it complicit assistant to the mechanisms of consumerism. A keyword search for Stonehenge on Google will produce results including a star rating, suggesting that the ancient measured arrangement of post-and-lintel stones is reducible to a ranking applicable to anything else on earth (what makes Stonehenge “better” or “worse” than the Rothko Chapel?). Lastly, I would note the anti-monumental and anti-authoritative trends among younger leftist demographics which may stem from a horror of history, perceived as nothing more and nothing less than a thread of subjugation, and allow themselves no recourse but putting-away or demolition. The centralized building is then perhaps equatable to the centralized critic: a suspect problematic founded upon arrogance, exploitation, and hegemonic occupancy. If we agree that this is where criticism largely is, one wonders what strength it has to affect culture besides accelerating its turnover rate, already too fast for anyone to follow.

For something with perhaps more answers to questions than this, I might do a little exploration, riffing on a similar inquiry about music, of what radical architecture has been throughout the 20th century and what it may look like now.

A curious fact about the Metroidvania genre, if you will permit it to in fact be a genre, is that, despite the influences accorded to Symphony of the Night on the Castlevania side of things, very nearly none of the games cast as such – and by now there are hundreds – have been interested in consciously modeling their look on SotN. Depending on what portions you’re examining, the 2018 release Timespinner might be one such rare example; although, to my eyes, it most often resembles an imaginary title released near the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan: certain rendering techniques and palettes are there, but the overall effect has a sort of glossy compression and grotesque meandering which I would sooner associate with Hagane. That I’m making this observation is not meant to be a critique of the genre. It could, however, be developed into a general critique of the sort of pixel art which has tended to make its way into finished works since the boom of “indie” productions. One could quite rightly say that the majority of this material pulls from a needlessly small pool of titles released on the NES and SNES, with the more obviously labor-intensive stuff often appearing to derive from (or at least have the most similarities to) the Amiga’s heavy-hitters and the adjacent demo scene.

Anyway, my intent with laying these things out is to draw attention to Team Ladybug’s 2021 release, Record of Lodoss War ~Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth~, which, besides achieving a quality of visuals full of skilled rigor yet appearing effortless, is probably the closest anyone has gotten to SotN’s style since its release – including the handheld titles produced by Koji Igarashi. Each of Team Ladybug’s prior games, like Pharaoh Rebirth and Shin Megami Tensei: Synchronicity Prologue, has demonstrated a similar excellence; but I think it was only upon Touhou Luna Nights where one could sometimes get a simultaneous sense of potential proximity to Castlevania and a slight move away from the smooth and cutely organized precedent set (and mostly still occupied) by Cave Story. With Deedlit, most people will, I assume, first seize on Deedlit’s sprite for a comparison, since it is blatantly based on Alucard’s. I would also note the abundance of particulate effects. The environments are the most significant, though. While a degree of flatness and sharp outlining has been maintained, the impression of depth and dimension to the surroundings – both their details and the recessing of layers – has greatly increased. This balance reaches back not only to Symphony of the Night but also to its canonical precedent, Rondo of Blood, which had a persistent, punchy aesthetic of sharply measured out tiles set against a number of stark backdrops with zones of pure black. SotN itself had sections illustrating this: examine, for example, the Marble Gallery’s lowest room.

The first screenshot above is one good condensation of the elements I tend to associate with Symphony of the Night’s places. For a broad point of comparison here, I might refer to the Colosseum or Olrox’s Quarters; for a specific one, maybe the Outer Wall’s leftmost vertical room with a hung figure. Here are a few of the elements which come to mind: 1) a definite shapeliness to each room, achieved by a contrast between the floors/walls/ceilings and the backdrops; 2) a careful partitioning of the background details, organized according to the foreground arrangement(s); 3) strong shadows alongside the walls and ceilings; 4) angled railings and staircases with visibly serrated contours; 5) borders’ screen-hugging extremities being much darker than the rest. In enumerating these elements, I’m not saying that they are always present no matter where you look in SotN (the fifth item, for instance, isn’t that common from area to area; yet, when it is present, it is notable), but rather that their appearance here and there creates a stylistic continuity which we can, in a way, reverse engineer as a guiding aesthetic.

The second and third screenshots I’ve included for how visibly they delight in the room-shape. For the second, it approximates a W shape, its middle an ogee arch with lips dividing shaft from dome. Note the inclusion of unnecessary but equally delightful structural anomalies: the two outward-thrusting platforms held up by colonettes and topped off by trussed posts. For the third, note the cavetto-like underside to the projection beside Deedlit, which creates a kind of minor shelter; and the way that the arched ceiling to the right has a supple continuity – the border’s line moves straight down and then curvaceously bends to the right. This quality, although brought out by the inverted castle (and bypassed in what is now a boring and bored tradition of dismissing a “lazy” and “inconvenient” quantitative supplement), is not specific to Symphony of the Night. I’ve mentioned it because the level design of these games is, in my opinion, at its best when it is, to an extent, formally inexplicable, prone to yielding to miniature architectonic fantasies and wordlessly evocative therein. Deedlit makes it especially distinct through its “silver-lined” surfaces and darkly receding cutaways.

I really don’t have much else to write here at the moment and would prefer to leave it to other people, perhaps those familiar with the terminology for pixel art, to do a better job of explaining this and that visual similarity. I just wanted to jot down some loose thoughts and hope that it might kick-start similar and more developed comparative considerations for readers.

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.

I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.

The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²

As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.

I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future – as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.” Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?

It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.

Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:

For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.

The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”

Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.

The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and – instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally – only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.

⁂

¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.

² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.

doshmanziari:

A piece that I wrote on ruins, medievalism, theater, antiquity, perception, and Demon’s Souls – including the 2020 remake – has been published on Deep Hell. Please give it a read!

Every building is a medium, for it imparts information put there by someone or something. Ruins are a special sort of medium, in a state of structural stability and instability. As mediums, they are closer to our meaning for intermediate. Each ruin is somewhere between its completion and an unimaginable apocalypse. It is both historical fact and, as Robert Harbison writes, a “way of seeing.” Of course, we would have it no other way: the pleasure of the ruin is that it is incomplete. Fixing the thing would spoil the mood. Much like how the strategic obfuscation of anatomy in sexual play makes the body more exciting, the absences and erosions of ruins provoke our imagination, because they hide — perhaps forever — what once was there.

I’m reposting this for anyone who might’ve missed it and also to share what my supplementary reading sources were. Harbison’s book was the most influential of the bunch. On first reading it, I wasn’t sure what to do with its ideas; but time, rumination, and a willingness/ability to make connections from one seemingly unrelated thing to another helped bring them to life for me.

• Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
• Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
• Emile Kaufmann, Étienne-Louis Boullée
• M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory
• James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere
• Various authors, The Architecture of Western Gardens
• Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture, Vol. 1
• Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture
• Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable
• John Summerson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century
• Nikolaus Pevsner, Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, Vol. 1
• Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto
• Various authors, Friedrich Gilly: Essays on Architecture, 1796-1799
• Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, Vol. 2

A piece that I wrote on ruins, medievalism, theater, antiquity, perception, and Demon’s Souls – including the 2020 remake – has been published on Deep Hell. Please give it a read!

Every building is a medium, for it imparts information put there by someone or something. Ruins are a special sort of medium, in a state of structural stability and instability. As mediums, they are closer to our meaning for intermediate. Each ruin is somewhere between its completion and an unimaginable apocalypse. It is both historical fact and, as Robert Harbison writes, a “way of seeing.” Of course, we would have it no other way: the pleasure of the ruin is that it is incomplete. Fixing the thing would spoil the mood. Much like how the strategic obfuscation of anatomy in sexual play makes the body more exciting, the absences and erosions of ruins provoke our imagination, because they hide — perhaps forever — what once was there.