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Urtzi Grau and Francesca Hughes ‘The End of Prediction’ exhibited at Chronograms of Architecture Exhibition, an exhibition organised by Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House and e-flux Architecture with the Architectural Association, between Friday 20 October 2023 to Saturday 9 December 2023
Chronograms of Architecture takes its starting point from Charles Jencks’ iconic Evolutionary Tree diagrams tracing architecture and society’s pulsations between different ideals through time. These ‘chronograms’ – diagrams of the history of architecture – were first created in 1969 and focus on the 80 years from 1920 to 2000. Beyond visualising and classifying architectural styles and traditions, Jencks’ ever-evolving diagrams provided a visual tool to analyse, understand, and represent dynamic relations between architecture and society as they unfold. It features contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Marson Korbi, Mario Carpo, Mark Garcia and Steven Hutt, Charles L Davis II and Curry J Hackett, Francesca Hughes and Urtzi Grau, MOULD, and Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken, alongside original material from the Charles Jencks Archive.
‘The End of Prediction’ updates Jencks’s dissimilarity matrix by substituting the architects that painted architecture’s future with thirty-four of the myriad academic managerial instruments/acronyms that currently determine the education of architects: 360 Review, AD, ARC, ARWU, CERIF, CRA, DP, EDI, E&I, EuroCRIS, ERA, FFE, FIPF, FoR, GS, H-Index, IVAR, JR, KPI, LMS, NWOL, OHS, ORCID, QA, QS, RE, REF, RA, RIMS, SMART, SFS, SLO, THE, and UKRI. Collectively they populate (how democratic of them…) the spreadsheets that increasingly govern all decisions in schools, from academic workload benchmarking and studio staff/student ratios to topics of research, design briefs, timetabling, and lecture length. That their component parameters have next-to-no bearing on anything that really matters to architectural education does not deter them from predicting its future with Oedipal determinism: future student numbers, future academic performance, future research income, future curricular risk amelioration, future student satisfaction, future workforce profiling, future lucrative research income streams and so on. Their collective blind spots (though they are hardly spots) miss the unmeasurable qualities of emergent pedagogical experiments, new forms of knowledge and its exchange, or important but revenue-evading research questions. As with elsewhere, the aim of this metrical saturation of architectural education is to cancel “accidents”—accidents that might derail the rise of mediocrity, amongst others. Hence, unlike the timeline, spreadsheets do not conjure but avoid the future. Or to be more precise, they void the future. The central interest of their prediction is compliance.
