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 be. In the practice of archi-
tecture, however, 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, representa-
tion/action), and the separations between them, are clues to understanding the ways a
supposedly ‘critical’ architecture is neutralised. The illusion of a critical architecture
becomes compatible with a specialisation in the production of both symbolic and social
capital. I don’t mean to be critical, but I want to suggest that a critical architecture may
be one that unsettles the architectural field, and one of the tasks of architectural cri-
tique may be to expose what might be called a ‘critical complicity’.
