What Criticism? Symposium

How do we embrace the new properties and opportunities of discourse without losing significance? Do we need to achieve some intellectual of formal constitutions to give sense to this practice? What are its new possible forms? Where does the difference lie between simple dissemination and the active distribution and commitment to the transformation of our environment? Are there multiple forms of criticism? Can we think critically about architecture and cities without the aim for sense and virtue? Does criticism need to be useful?
This symposium intends to pose these questions and confront the idea of a single way of practicing or understanding criticism nowadays, as well as it shamelessly suggests the impossibility of its pure existence. As Foucault pointed out already in 1978, critique is by nature “condemned to dispersion, dependency and pure heteronomy”, and its contemporary forms emphasize those conditions in many aspects that urge for conscious reflections and a renewed vocabulary.
Even if critics are usually known for their visible skepticism and discomfort, one can assume they practice criticism because they care. They might be committed to some idealistic –sometimes even un-confessed– belief in this intellectual activity as a vehicle for change, or their activity may simply be defined by the sensitive observation and interpretation of the existing.

Concept, Development, and Text: Florencia Rodriguez
Visual Design: Pablo Gerson
Symposium held at Harvard GSD / 2014