Productive Failures for Thinking Architecture

Productive Failures in Thinking Architecture is based on Hegel's aphorism: "The fear of making a mistake is itself a mistake." Therefore, a failure in architecture is not, for example, building a structure that collapses in an earthquake because it was poorly designed and constructed. That is merely a "visible accident." A productive failure is one of the dynamics that enables the functioning of the social system expressed by the name of architecture. It means making critical diagnoses of what has been done and then working to rectify that fault. The system has worked this way since the late 15th century. It produces crises and crisis solutions. Many changes not labeled as failures in popular culture are actually failures; because they render what was being done and thought up to that point debatable and/or invalid. The systematization of architecture, humor, supranationalism, the discovery of historicity, the emergence of engineering, role conflicts, randomness, etc., have all produced productive failures. One can add many new headings to these and others discussed in this book. Because architectural failures, for example, bear little resemblance to political and economic failures; they do not paralyze the environment or render it inoperable. More importantly, a specific phenomenon or change becomes a failure if someone recognizes it as such. It is opposition that makes a failure a failure. Without that oppositional stance, architecture cannot produce productive thought and design.