The diachronic study of genres in architecture: towards a better understanding of recent evolutions in this professional domain

Résumé En

Genres are types of communicative events that target a specific type of audience or readership and have specific goals (Swales 1990). Professional genres are shared and recognised by members of a professional domain, and can be seen as both revelators and triggers of change in this domain. Diachronic studies of professional genres seek to cover external features such as their aim or the conditions of their production and reception as well as internal features such as their organisation in moves (Swales 1990), multimodality (Amare & Manning 2016) and lexico-grammatical patterns (Gledhill & Kübler 2016).We focus on the genre of projects descriptions, published by architects and their team to describe and promote their latest work in brochures in 1970-1995 (corpus A) and on their practice’s website in 1995-2020 (corpus B). In the same way as architecture reviews, where structural, multimodal and linguistic characteristics indicate a recent shift to slightly more efficient promotion, more interaction and less critical debate, project descriptions are subject to change: we suspect that the recent stabilisation of the genre (in terms of structure, multimodality and phraseology), the greater use of lexis such as new, different, unique and new lexico-grammatical patterns such as “Our aim/brief was to create + SN” reveal a context of greater competition between architectural practices and the acceptance of a new marketing tool such as websites by architects. Conversely, genres also have an impact on the domain of architecture: the “migration” of the genre to the net allows the practice to reach everyone easily and more rapidly and the architect’s core activity of designing projects becomes inseparable from marketing this work to obtain new commissions.