“Super Useless.” SOUPERgreen! Ed. Doug Jackson (London: Actar, 2017).

Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 text, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, described an age of “hurried empiricism” in which we no longer ask if knowledge is true, but rather of “what use is it?” In a more recent essay, the architectural critic and professor David Leatherbarrow echoes this evaluation in architectural practice and theory, when he describes what he sees as a shift “from what the building is to what it does.” The current proliferation of performance-themed conferences, symposia, and publications certainly document this change. This move is also evidenced in the quantification (and related granting of awards) of the projected energy consumption of built work. Often, the increased performance of a building is also related to an interest in marketability for the firm developing the work. Concomitant to this turn in architectural epistemology and production is a shift in the expectations of the studio. The research-based studio has recently re-emerged and with it a renewed fascination with fabrication, bio-mimicry, information-based design, and all things parametric often under the guise of performance. At best, perhaps, is a new awareness achieved by grafting the techniques of the natural sciences onto architectural production in the hope of providing a new “utilitas,” by way of material efficiencies, form-making, fabrication techniques, responses to ecological (and other) crises, and, even, a renewed sense of the discipline of architecture.

Despite these noble intentions most architectural studios still, however, produce work that is not at the scale of a building. If built, work is either a singular prototype, a scaled version of a larger vision, or at the scale of a small housing unit. There are exceptions. The work at the Media Lab at MIT, the popular US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon and others do produce built work that is indeed performative, but ironically often uninhabited. More often than not, a studio produces artifacts that are inherently useless beyond the immediate academic environment but still does so under the guise of performance. While I would not argue that any of this is entirely useless, I would argue that is not always useful in the manner intended. What if the work produced in studio was recognized and understood for its uselessness? What if a project was not intended to be anything other than the artifacts produced – drawings, models, writings – not “of” a future oriented production, but valuable in and of themselves? What might be the use of that? Further, rather than studio attempting to mimic a normative architectural practice, what if an architectural practice attempted to mimic the uselessness of studio? In this short essay, I would like to propose that a model for architectural agency could be that of uselessness.