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When he first said that, I didn’t even understand what he meant by irony here, but he explained that what he was referring to was the high cultural status of the architecture as opposed to that of tap dancing.5 Deliberate hybridization has been one of the topics of Bergren’s work already, in her writing and teaching practices so far and now in her design practice. Bergren’s architecture courses in Los Angeles since 1987 have been a sustained challenge to the institutionalized presumptions of architectural education. Preliminarily trained as a classicist she has had recourse to a Greek term graphé, meaning both to write and to draw, to help her articulate her thesis that for architects the two activities of intellectual enterprise on the one hand and craftsmanship and design on the other, of mind and hand, need not be mutually exclusive. The contradiction of this is clearly legible in the structure of all the most prestigious architecture schools. Theory courses, which engage in reading and writing, are separated from studios, and those instructors considered competent to teach in one area are, by virtue of that very qualification, unqualified to teach in the other. This is obvious; this is the most obvious thing to say. In Bergren’s courses the work her students produced often included writing, drawing, and modelmaking in integrated pieces. Needless to say some of these were more successful than others. And indeed the idea might be glaringly obvious or just patently contrarian. Bergren’s forefather in educational reform could be none other that John Ruskin, who similarly opposed the suggestion that there could ever be either pure thought or pure sensation. In Modern Painters, of Walter Scott and Wordsworth’s claim that their enjoyment of nature was purely sensory, he wrote, "[their] delight, so far from being without thought, is more than half made up of thought, but of thought in so curiously languid and neutralized a condition that they cannot trace it."6 It is the institutional endorsement of the curiously languid and neutralized thinking of architecture students that Bergren has been working hard to challenge. In 1996 she interrupted this work to attend Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and obtain a Master of Architecture degree. And her design projects there continued some of the same interest in refashioning the dualistic structure of everyday assumptions about theory and practice, high and low, smart guys and dumb guys. For this project and for others, I’ve been developing this notion of a kind of tropos, from the Greek word for turning…The relation of irony would not be lost be simply reversing the relation — making the formerly low category into the high, for example — since the two categories are still opposed and there is still a clear difference between them. And irony would not be lost if the difference between the two categories were dissolved. The possibility of irony as a tool of knowing and evaluating is lost when the categories are different, but not exclusively.7 Irony is already lost as a tool of knowing and evaluating because categories are always different, but not exclusively. If this project were ever built, a visitor arriving at the site from the south by car would face an initial choice: to enter the Dance and Architecture building on the right, driving into its underground parking areas, or to travel a long, straight ramp, up and through the building above ground, passing between the Dance and Architecture building on the right and a Theater on the left. One would travel around the theater counterclockwise, following the northern ridge of the site and cutting across it as it dropped away to the west, then dropping down into parking levels cut halfway into the hillside. Ann Bergren has been dancing with Diane Davisson Dancers since 1991.
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