ABSTRACT
When someone begins a statement: ‘I don’t mean to be critical but . . .’, then we
are forewarned that they do mean to be critical, and they will. In the practice of
architecture the reverse is often the case. Architecture that is meant to be critical
becomes incorporated into, and complicit with, a prevailing economic, political
and social order: the ever-the-same returns in the guise of the ‘critical’. In this
chapter I will suggest that critical architectural practices can be seen to operate
along two semi-separate dimensions: the ‘formal’ construction of meaning and
the ‘spatial’ mediation of everyday life. The conceptual oppositions buried here
(form/function, representation/action), and the separations between them, are
clues to understanding the ways a supposedly ‘critical’ architecture is neutralized.
The illusion of a critical architecture becomes compatible with a specialization
