Ilinca Pop
Teaching Assistant, History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation Department at ‘Ion Mincu’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania.
Ilinca Pop graduated from UAUIM in 2018 and holds a PhD from the same university (2024). Her thesis, drafted under the supervision of Ana Maria Zahariade, focuses on the uses of truth in architectural theory until the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century to historicize notions of true architecture and truthful architecture. Ilinca is a collaborating teaching assistant in the History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation Department at UAUIM, having taught theory seminars for 1st and 2nd year students since 2019. Recently, she had co-translated Common Space: The City as Commons by Stavros Stavrides (Spațiul comun. Orașul ca bun comun, Editura Vellant, 2023, with Deniz Otay) and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (Corpuri care contează, Editura Universității ‘Lucian Blaga’ din Sibiu, 2023, with Cătălina Stanislav). Between 2019 and 2023 she was an assistant manager for open architectural design competitions at the Romanian Order of Architects.
True Architecture and Truthful Architecture: Recovering a Critical Category
Keywords: beauty; taste; reason; aesthetics; 18th century architectural theory
Abstract: The idea that architecture should be truthful stirs many questions in the mind of the contemporary critical thinker, but to many architects working either in the field of practice, theory, or architecture education, this judging criterion remains yet untroubled by doubt. Architects seem to share an immutable consensus about what architecture’s truth content represents, that it imbues construction with moral validity, and that it favours or forbids certain kinds of expressivity. The discourse on truthful or honest architecture entails an odd amphibology, where the value judgement becomes independent of the project’s grounds, albeit historically arising precisely from the truth claim of those grounds. Consequently, truthful architecture interpellates a broad category, generally consisting of but not limited to buildings displaying raw construction materials, maintaining the intelligibility of their structure, exhibiting the appropriateness of form in relation to function, or manifestly announcing the economic constraints or other aspects of their context. Similar expressions of two projects departing from entirely different reasonings might easily lead to the same judgement. By this logic, the critic either links the act of construction to a morally superior dimension of architectural practice —and, indeed, of the object itself— or they conversely criticise it, by making use of the same ambiguous terms, for relying on a depoliticised way of understanding morality. In recent literature, both stances reinforced the idea that truthful architecture designates an aesthetic category as such. Inquiring pre-modernist discourses where the idea that architecture expresses truth originates, this paper traces the contradictions of the current architectural discourse back to the theoretical issues of the 18th century. By deconstructing the antitheses which shaped the meaning of truth in architecture, we might begin moving towards more fruitful species of contemporary criticism.