Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture 9781350046177, 9781350046207, 9781350046184

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Postmodern Architecture and the Media: An Introduction
Part I: Postmodern Architecture’s Pursuit of a New Spatial and Visual Culture: Architecture as Image Versus Image as Architecture
1. Bau Magazine and the Architecture of Media (1965–1970)
2. Serial Postmodernity: Architectural Association Publications in the 1980s
3. ‘I Decline to be a Missionary’: Late-Modern Mirrors and Transformations in Modern Architecture
Part II: International Postmodernisms: Micro-narratives and their Contribution to Architecture
4. Reima Pietilä’s (Postmodern) Morphologies
5. Issues of Realism: Archithese, Postmodernism and Swiss Architecture, 1971–1986
6. Alessandro Mendini, Domus and the Postmodern Vision (1979–1985)
Part III: Postmodern Architects as Thinkers: Bridging Theory and Practice
7. Transition to ‘Discourse’: Architecture Theory in Postmodern Australia
8. Charles Moore’s Perspecta Essays: Towards Postmodern Eclecticism
9. The Alibi of Style: Reading Classicism in Architectural Design Magazine (1979–1982)
10. Postmodern Architects as Theorists: The Case of the Essay Collection (1988–1998)
Part IV: Postmodern Architecture and the Institution: Between the Elite and the Public
11. Institutionalizing Postmodernism: Reconceiving the Journal and the Exhibition at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976
12. Image, Medium, Artefact: Heinrich Klotz and the Postmodern Architecture Museum
Index

Citation preview

MEDIATED MESSAGES

MEDIATED MESSAGES Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture

Edited by Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka, 2018 Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image © Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main; Foto: Waltraud Krase, Frankfurt am Main For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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CONTENTS

List of Figures vii Preface Barry Bergdoll xi List of Contributors xv Acknowledgements xx

Postmodern Architecture and the Media: An Introduction Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka 1 Part I Postmodern Architecture’s Pursuit of a New Spatial and Visual Culture: Architecture as Image Versus Image as Architecture 23 1 Bau Magazine and the Architecture of Media (1965–1970) Eva Branscome 25 2 Serial Postmodernity: Architectural Association Publications in the 1980s Igor Marjanović 43 3 ‘I Decline to be a Missionary’: Late-Modern Mirrors and Transformations in Modern Architecture Michael Kubo 61 Part II International Postmodernisms: Micro-narratives and their Contribution to Architecture 83 4 Reima Pietilä’s (Postmodern) Morphologies Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen 85 5 Issues of Realism: Archithese, Postmodernism and Swiss Architecture, 1971–1986 Irina Davidovici 101

6 Alessandro Mendini, Domus and the Postmodern Vision (1979–1985) Silvia Micheli 121 Part III Postmodern Architects as Thinkers: Bridging Theory and Practice 141 7 Transition to ‘Discourse’: Architecture Theory in Postmodern Australia Andrew Leach 143 8 Charles Moore’s Perspecta Essays: Towards Postmodern Eclecticism Patricia A. Morton 159 9 The Alibi of Style: Reading Classicism in Architectural Design Magazine (1979–1982) Elizabeth Keslacy 175 10 Postmodern Architects as Theorists: The Case of the Essay Collection (1988–1998) Stéphanie Dadour 197 Part IV Postmodern Architecture and the Institution: Between the Elite and the Public 211 11 Institutionalizing Postmodernism: Reconceiving the Journal and the Exhibition at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976 Kim Förster 213 12 Image, Medium, Artefact: Heinrich Klotz and the Postmodern Architecture Museum Daniela Fabricius

Index 247

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CONTENTS

231

FIGURES

I.1 Installation view of the exhibition ‘The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts’. MoMA, NY, October 29, 1975 January 4, 1976. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photographer: David Allison (copyright The Museum of Modern Art, NY). Acc. n.: IN111.7.© 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. 2 I.2 Box C1 of the IAUS archives at the Canadian Center for Architecture, photograph by Véronique Patteeuw, 2010.

6

1.1 The twenty-four issues of Bau magazine that were published from 1965 to 1970 represented a hybrid rethinking of architecture. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld. 26 1.2 Bau 5/6 (1965): Space travel promised new possiblities for architecture as a threshold to the built environment, including media and communication. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld. 33 1.3 Bau 1 (1965): Hollein’s contribution to this first issue foresees architecture as deeply embedded in selfcontained post-apocalyptic scenarios, juxtaposing his work to a space station from Life magazine and Archigram’s ‘Walking City’. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld. 39 2.1 Peter Eisenman, Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1985), Folio 5, cover and plate no. 14. 48 2.2 Peter Eisenman, Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors (1986), Box 3, acrylic box and stacked prints. 51

2.3 Daniel Libeskind’s Theatrum Mundi (1985), Mega 1, Mary Miss’s Projects 1966–1987 (1987), Mega 7, and Gunnar Asplund 1885–1940: The Dilemma of Classicism (1988), Mega 9, dust jackets. 52 3.1 Installation view of the exhibition, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture,’ February 21, 1979 through April 24, 1979. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelatin-silver print, 6 x 9” (15.2 x 22.9 cm). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo: Mali Olatunji. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 62 3.2 Installation view of the exhibition, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture,’ February 21, 1979 through April 24, 1979. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelatin-silver print, 6 x 9” (15.2 x 22.9 cm). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (IN1250.3) Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 67 3.3 ‘Structure: Glass Skins’, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 80–81. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979. 72 3.4 ‘Structure: Glass Skins’, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 86–87. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979. 73 4.1 Studies titled ‘Études de morphologie en urbanisme par Reima Pietilä.’ Reproduced from Le Carré Bleu 3 (1960): foldout. 87 4.2 Reima Pietilä’s ‘Vyöhyke’ (The Zone) exhibition, from Finnish Architectural Review 1 (1968). 94 4.3 Reima Pietilä working on the Space Garden exhibition with his co-workers, c. 1972. 96

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FIGURES

5.1

archithese 13 (1975), Las Vegas etc., oder Realismus in der Architektur. Cover showing Venturi and Rauch’s Guild House, Philadelphia, 1960–1963. Source: archithese / Niggli Publishers. 107

5.2

archithese 19 (1976), Realismus in der Architektur. Cover with model by Giorgio Grassi. Source: archithese / Niggli Publishers. 109

6.1

Domus 602 (January 1980), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved. 127

6.2

Domus 608 (July 1980), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved. 129

6.3

Domus 630 (July 1982), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved. 132

7.1

Cover of the fourth issue of Transition (October 1980). Copyright Transition. 148

7.2

Cover of the Interview issue of Transition (April 1984). Copyright RMIT Faculty of Architecture and Design. 150

7.3

Cover of the first Discourse issue of Architecture Australia (June 1984). Copyright Architecture Media.

154

8.1

Charles Moore, ‘Hadrian’s Villa’, Perspecta 6 (1960), 22. 163

8.2

Charles Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Perspecta 9–10 (1965), 59. 165

8.3

Charles Moore, ‘Plug It In Ramses And See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going To Keep It Unless It Works’, Perspecta 11 (1967), 37. 169

9.1A Cover, Neo-Classicism (1980), guest-edited by Geoffrey Broadbent. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley. 177 9.1B Cover, Post-Modern Classicism (1980), guest-edited by Charles Jencks. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and Michael Graves Architecture and Design. 178 9.1C Cover, Free-Style Classicism (1982), guest-edited by Charles Jencks. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. 179

FIGURES

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9.1D

Cover, Classicism is not a Style (1982), guest-edited by Demetri Porphyrios. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and Dr. Demetri Porphyrios. 180

9.2A Spreads from Oswald Mathias Ungers, ‘Five Lessons and B from Schinkel’, in Free-Style Classicism, Architectural Design Profile (1982). Images reproduced courtesy Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft and Wiley. 184 9.3

Spread from Charles Moore, ‘Piazza d’Italia’, in PostModern Classicism, Architectural Design Profile (1980). Images reproduced courtesy Charles Jencks, R. Allen Eskew, FAIA, Norman McGrath and Wiley. 186

11.1

Cover of Oppositions 5, the ‘Italian Issue’, published in October 1976 by MIT Press. Source: private library. 217

11.2

Poster for ‘Idea as Model’ exhibition at the IAUS, designed by Michael Graves and students from Princeton University, winter 1976-77. Source: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatsammlung, ZHdK. 222

11.3

Cover of IAUS exhibition catalogue Idea as Model. 22 Architects 1976/80, published in 1981 by Rizzoli International. Source: private library. 223

12.1

Heinrich Klotz in the Kunsthal Rotterdam, 1988. (Freek van Arkel). 232

12.2

Installation view showing models by Oswald Mathias Ungers and archive files. ‘Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960–1980’. 2 June–10 October 1984. Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt Photo: Waltraud Krase. 233

12.3

Clockwise from top left: Louis Kahn, Salk Institute, San Diego, 1965; Robert Venturi, Guild House, 1961; Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, BASCO Showroom, Northeast Philadelphia, 1976; Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan, 1973. All photos by Heinrich Klotz. 238

12.4

Home of Aldo Rossi, 1981. Photo by Heinrich Klotz.

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FIGURES

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PREFACE BARRY BERGDOLL

P

ostmodernism, it might be claimed, was issued onto the world stage in 1980 through the cinema sets created in response to Paolo Portoghesi’s casting call for the Venice Biennale’s first full-fledged extravaganza of architectural display. Or, at the very least, that was the ambition of an event that capitalized on the shifting of attitudes that was long underway in many quarters. If, nearly six decades earlier, the black-and-white photographs of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA’s) 1932 show Modern Architecture: International Exhibition had also doubled as images circulated to the professional press which aimed at sponsoring a shift in the taste culture of American architecture, now the images coming from Venice were full-blown technicolour, as apt to appear in lifestyle magazines as in the professional press, ready for the evening news on television, and participating in a media world that had expanded exponentially in the post-war decades. MoMA showed images of buildings already extant around the world (‘international’ it was claimed, when in fact they were culled from but two continents), whereas in 1980 the images and what they depicted came into existence simultaneously in Venice. 1980s images, moreover, were images of images, marking them in that regard as much a part of emergent postmodernism as they were by virtue of their revelling in historical imagery, ironic multiple coding, or their embrace of artifice. Exhibitions and the periodical press, as time-bound and ephemeral media, had always had a symbiotic relationship; but it was one that grew dramatically with the advances in the closing years of the nineteenth century of the ability to reproduce photographs inexpensively as an integral part of a printed newspaper or magazine. Curatorial and editorial choices began to work in tandem. At its founding in 1932, the New York museum’s Department of Architecture was primarily a clearing house of photographic images hoping to change the visual landscape of both the professional magazines that US architects followed and the daily newspapers. The department did not collect – or for that matter display – architectural drawings, but rather photographs that could be frequently reproduced for travelling displays or by being loaned out to the press. Reproducibility rather than originality was

the ethos that distinguished MoMA’s novel Departments of Architecture and of Industrial Design from that of Painting and Sculpture. Postmodernism was not the first international movement in architecture to leverage the power of the intertwined media of exhibitions and periodicals; but it was, arguably, the first to realize that it might be possible for architecture to exist exclusively in that world. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, cocurators of the 1932 show, insisted that their exhibition feature only built work, lest what they baptized as ‘The International Style’ be dismissed as merely a world of chimeric projections, of avant-garde postures confined to the circuits of the art world. Images were gathered of work that had been created in the previous decade, at once retrospective and prognostic. What Jean-François Lyotard had labelled ‘The Post-Modern Condition’ in 1979 was characterized by a permanent blurring, negation, indeed, of any distinction between reality and publicity. The Strada Novissima that Portoghesi orchestrated in the Corderie of the Venice naval arsenal was emphatically a stage set and was born famous, although its critical reception was based largely on photographs that circulated widely and long after the display had been dismantled. Postmodernism’s arsenal would be media tools, its existence based on a media ecology in which the symbiosis between institutions of display and institutions of publication, of publicity tout court, was primary. If it is still possible to visit many of the key works cited in the 1932 publication The International Style, most of the key works of early postmodernism exist only in the pages of periodicals where they circulated for years. The Strada Novissima enjoyed a brief recreation in Paris in 1981, but few whose attitudes about architecture were influenced by it had experienced it directly. In this it was anticipated by only a few key buildings of early international expositions, such as Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, known only through black-and-white photographs until it was recreated in full-blown colour in the 1980s at the height of postmodernism. While Beatriz Colomina – in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994)1 – borrowed the new phenomenon of postmodern media culture to diagnose an earlier advent of such strategies on the part of a handful of media-savvy, avant-garde practitioners, with postmodernism much that was first advanced in the 1920s and 1930s was literally institutionalized. Little magazines, ephemeral publications that were co-existent with an aesthetic or ideological position or configuration, characterized modernist avant-gardes, postmodern publicity moved into a more institutionalized and established landscape; hence its readiness to become an instrument of forces beyond itself, of forces of new economies of image, notably. And this was an international network, analysed in this volume through not only longstanding publications like the Italian Domus or the British Architectural Design, but also through the new phenomenon of institutions that realized the amplifier effect of a culture of publication. In this the politics of publication of both periodicals, most notably AA Files and exhibition catalogues at London’s Architectural Association under Alvin Boyarsky, is a key

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example. It was an example that was to be emulated rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic, notably at Columbia University once Bernard Tschumi moved there from the AA to take up the deanship in the late 1980s. At the same time as architecture gained a foothold in the Venice Biennale, an established bulwark of the art world since the 1890s, the periodical press began to pay more and more attention to the exploding world of exhibitions as much as the world of completed buildings. Magazines in which postmodern imagery and reflections circulated were often established magazines garnered to the cause: Domus, Architectural Design, Yale University’s Perspecta, Archithese, all analysed here in a series of case studies that offer so many facets of a world of increasingly international networks. Architecture history has caught up with postmodernism in architecture, it might be said, with the institutional turn in the study objects of the discipline. In the last decade architecture historians have enriched our understanding of architecture culture, particularly of modernity, as they have moved away from the primacy of the traditional monographic celebration of the individual creator or from the study of patrons, clients, and building types that accompanied the rise of a social history of architecture in the 1960s, to name but a few of the enrichments of the arsenal of analysis that has accompanied scholarship. Rather, the role media – from print to the growing world of what Lyotard called ‘the immaterial’ – has played in not only the reception but the production of architecture has increasingly been a concern. The press, museums, spaces of exhibition, and the media in general, have been understood as institutions in their own right, as much as institutions of government. The editors of this volume are themselves key contributors to that growing trend, Léa-Catherine Szacka in her important study of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale and Véronique Patteeuw with her recent PhD on French architecture periodicals of the 1960s. Assembled in this volume are invaluable case studies of some of the periodicals that contributed to the trend as well as to some of the institutions, notably the MoMA, who responded and, to some extent, contributed to a complex emergence of an interlocked network of agents of image production and circulation. But equally important is the paradoxical weakening of the traditional hierarchy of institutions: institutions that rode on an accepted hegemony, like MoMA, were often displaced by other more innovative producers from London’s Architectural Association to New York’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, which, under Peter Eisenman, realized that the nexus of exhibitions and publications, particularly when emanating from the same institution, could have a multiplier effect throughout the profession and beyond. By the early 1980s it had developed a sophisticated hierarchy of publications from the booklike journal Oppositions to the monthly newspaper Skyline, elegantly designed by graphic designer Massimo Vignelli. This was not only to serve as a model for schools of architecture ever since, but also to engender publications untethered from institutional support or even a fixed editorial office, leading to the world of the nomadic website of today’s architecture culture that emanates from the ether.

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Many of the major themes, as well, that have been at the heart of a new generation of critical analysis of architectural postmodernism, and the debate on its chronological boundaries, are evoked in these individual studies: the interdependence of postmodernism in architecture with the increased centring of advanced capitalist economies on the trading of intangible post-industrial assets, the collapse of any meaningful distinction between high and popular culture so central to high modernism in the 1950s, the correlation between postmodernism and the rise of neoliberalism, especially after the nearly simultaneous victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan which bracketed Portoghesi’s mounting of The Presence of the Past, the theme he gave to the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. But, as with any assembly of studies issuing from a symposium, there are as many productive routes to travel suggested as paths fully traversed. On the strength of case studies such as these can be built the analyses of the very networks and interconnections at play that made each nodal point part of a larger rhizomic system of publicity and discourse. And just as postmodernism blurred the divisions between spheres of culture, so is the analysis performed here on the central organs of the architectural profession to be extended to the unprecedented penetration of postmodern architecture imagery and experience into mass media and even non-print media. There can be no doubt that in the emerging analysis of the symbiosis of media and message that characterized postmodernism, this selection of essays offers a key building block.

Note 1 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Eva Branscome is an Austrian-American architectural historian and writer based in London. Her doctorate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, supervised by Adrian Forty, involved a rethinking of Postmodernism through the work of the Austrian architect, Hans Hollein. On completing her thesis, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation to research into the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Eva Branscome has taught at University College London since 2012, both in the Bartlett and in the History of Art Department. She has published many essays on the history of modern architecture, and her book on Hans Hollein and Postmodernism: Art and Architecture on Austria, 1958-1985, was published by Routledge in 2017. Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Trained in art history rather than architecture, his interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. In exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator from 2007 to 2013, Bergdoll has offered a series of exhibitions intended to offer more inclusive visions of subjects from Mies van der Rohe (and his relationship to garden reform and landscape), the Bauhaus, Henri Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Latin American post-war architecture, and most recently Frank Lloyd Wright. Stéphanie Dadour is an architectural historian and co-founder of Dadour de Pous, an architecture office based in Paris. She is associate professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble in Histoires et Cultures architecturales, member of Laboratoire des Métiers de l’histoire de l’Architecture (ENSAG) and Laboratoire Architecture, Culture et Société (ENSA ParisMalaquais). Her researches deal with the divide between theory and practice, the representation of identity politics and architecture and the reconstruction of Lebanon. She has been awarded fellowships from the FQRSC and the Centre Pompidou, and was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York.

Irina Davidovici is an architect and historian. She pursues research in the field of contemporary Swiss practice, architectural pedagogy and criticism, and the European history of social housing. She is currently senior researcher at ETH Zurich and Richard Rogers Fellow at Harvard GSD. She has lectured at ETH Zurich, the Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, EPFL Lausanne and Kingston University, and served as jury member for the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 2014. Her publications include the monograph Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (2012, second edition 2018), the edited volume Colquhounery: Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (2015) as well as articles in OASE, AA Files, Casabella, archithese, ARCH+ and Werk, Bauen + Wohnen. Daniela Fabricius is historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism. Her writing has been published in Architectural Design, Journal of Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Stadtbauwelt, and Log. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and received an MArch from Columbia University after studying Comparative Literature and Visual Art at Brown University. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, a DAAD Research Fellowship, and a Whiting Doctoral Fellowship. She currently teaches at the Pratt Institute in New York and is at work on a book about rationalism in West German architecture between the 1960s and 1980s. Kim Förster is an architectural historian, researcher, writer and teacher. Since 2016, he is Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, where in 2017 he curated an Octagonal Gallery exhibition on Kenneth Frampton as a pedagogue. Having a background in English and American Studies, Geography, and Pedagogy, he holds a PhD in architecture from ETH Zurich, where from 2013 to 2015 he taught a methods seminar in the doctoral program the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture. For his research, he received major grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Graham Foundation. He has published in various architectural magazines and journals, as co-editor of An Architektur, member of common room, and currently guest editor of Candide. His first monograph, an institutional critique and cultural analysis of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York, 1967-1985) is forthcoming. Elizabeth Keslacy is an architectural historian-theorist and educator. She currently serves as Lecturer at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Adjunct Professor at Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, MI, where she teaches design, history, and theory. She recently completed her dissertation, The Architecture of Design: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (1896-1976), which explored the intersections of architecture, the decorative arts, and design. Her scholarship and criticism can be found in the Journal of Architectural Education, Thresholds, Footprint and Offramp.

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Michael Kubo is assistant professor of architectural history and theory at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. He was previously Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art and associate curator for Office US, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 International Architecture Biennale in Venice. His books include Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (2015), OfficeUS Atlas (2015), and The Function of Ornament (2006). Kubo holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is currently developing a book based on his dissertation, on The Architects Collaborative and the emergence of the architectural corporation in the 20th century. Andrew Leach is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, where he teaches the history of architecture. He recently concluded an ARC Future Fellowship, from which research this essay is drawn. Among his recent books are Gold Coast (2018), Crisis on Crisis, Rome, On Discomfort (edited with David Ellison) (all 2017), and The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880-1980 (edited with Maarten Delbeke and John Macarthur), as well as What is Architectural History? (2010) and Manfredo Tafuri (2007). He works on the twentieth-century history of architectural discourse and on the architectural and urban history of Australasia. He is a former editor of Fabrications, the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, and is currently editor-inchief of Architectural Theory Review. In 2017-18, he held a Wallace Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Igor Marjanović is chair and professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Trained as both an architect and architectural historian, he investigates the role of pedagogy, exhibitions, and publications in the emergence of global architecture culture. His most recent exhibition and book project, Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, offers a close reading of the imaginative spirit of drawing as a medium that was, and continues to be, instrumental to the development of the field of architecture. His other book projects extend this investigation into mediums and international dialogues across the twentieth century, including On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia, 1918–1941 and Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision. Marjanović holds a Ph.D. from the Bartlett School of Architecture, a Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Belgrade. Silvia Micheli is Lecturer at The University of Queensland. Micheli’s research investigates global architecture and cross-cultural exchanges in the 20th and 21st century architectural context. Silvia holds wide expertise in post-war, postmodern and contemporary Italian architecture and the city. She co-authored the book Storia dell’architettura italiana 1985-2015 (Einaudi, 2013) and co-edited the

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volume Italia 60/70. Una stagione dell’architettura (Il Poligrafo, 2010). At the present, Silvia is investigating Italian postmodern architecture. She has written extensively about the work of Paolo Portoghesi, including the co-authored journal article ‘Paolo’s Triangolo’ for AA Files (2016). She has recently edited the book Italy/Australia: Postmodern in Translation (URO, 2018). Silvia has a range of international institutional collaborations, including with the Alvar Aalto Foundation (Helsinki), Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAXXI Museum (Rome), IUAV University (Venice), Milan Triennale, Polytechnic of Milan and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Patricia A. Morton is Associate Professor in the Art History Department at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris (MIT Press, 2000). She has lectured and published widely on architectural history and race, gender and identity. Her current book project, Paying for the Public Life, focuses on work by architect Charles W. Moore and examines how architects negotiated the contested public sphere of the 1960s and created new forms of architecture and urbanism responsive to contemporary social conditions. She is past editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Second Vice President of the Society of Architectural Historians. Véronique Patteeuw is an architect, researcher and critic based in Brussels. She is Associate Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage Lille and an editor of OASE, Journal for Architecture. Her research focuses on the theory and history of architectural publications, mostly intersecting with the history of postmodernism. Patteeuw has co-curated the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2006 and has lectured at ENSA Versailles, EPFL Lausanne, and Columbia University NY. Her publications include: Action and Reaction in Architecture, (OASE97), OMA, the first decade, (OASE94), What is OMA, Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (NAi Publishers, 2003), 51N4E Space Producers, (NAi Publishers, 2004). Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is an architect, writer and Associate Professor at Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches design, history and theory subjects. Her scholarly work deals with the genesis and meaning of form in various geographic and historical contexts. She has authored and edited several books, most notably: Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture (MIT Press/Graham Foundation, 1996), Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (co-edited with Donald Albrecht; Yale University Press, 2006), Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009), Kevin Roche: Architecture as an Environment (Yale University Press, 2011), and Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture (Phaidon Press, 2018).

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Léa-Catherine Szacka is an architect, writer and Lecturer in Architectural Studies  at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern – The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) - for which she was awarded the 2017 Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain - and co-author of Le Concert: Pink-Floyd à Venise (2017). Szacka’s work and research focus on the history of architecture exhibitions and other forms of ephemeral architecture, as well as on the history and theory of postmodern architecture. In 2011, she was co-editor, with Charles Jencks and Eva Branscome, of the re-edition of The Post-modern Reader. She has also contributed to journals such as Log, OASE, Arch+, AA Files, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Architecture, Domus, Architectural Design and Volume and is now part of the Editorial Board of Footprints: Delft Architecture Theory Journal.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M

ost of the essays collected in this volume were first presented in 2014 at the third biannual conference of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) in Turin, Italy or at the 67th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) at Austin, Texas. We would like to warmly thank both the EAHN and the SAH for giving us the opportunity to embark on this exploration of the theme of architecture periodicals and exhibitions and their role in shaping postmodern architecture. This was a great adventure that allowed us to expand our horizons, while meeting like-minded scholars – some of who have since become good friends. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume, whose research and insights on postmodernism, as well as friendly collaboration, patience and constant dedication and commitment to this project has been a delight and an enormous privilege. Thanks also go to all the reviewers who have kindly accepted to take part in this project, generously giving their time and advises – Andrew Higgott, Adrian Forty, Helene Jannière, Tina Di Carlo, Steve Parnell, Christophe Van Gerrewey, Richard Klein, Maristella Casciato, Valery Didelon, Catherine Blain, and Irene Sunwoo. Also, we are especially grateful to Maarten Delbeke, Christophe Van Gerrewey and D’Laine Camp for providing invaluable critical reading and helping polishing our introduction to this book. Finally, we would like to thank our respective institutions: The Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lille (LACTH), The Oslo School of Architecture and Design and the University of Manchester for providing us with research time as well as the support we needed in order to pursue this project.

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE AND THE MEDIA: AN INTRODUCTION VÉRONIQUE PATTEEUW and LÉA-CATHERINE SZACKA

Instead of building the buildings – we didn’t have the time nor the money – we built the façades and we took the message through because it was amplified by the media, just in the same way as Johnson’s AT&T building became a media event. CHARLES JENCKS, 20091

Recalling the Strada Novissima, centrepiece of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Charles Jencks emphatically highlights the importance of the relationship between postmodern architecture and media. Postmodern architecture was ‘amplified by the media’ and books were an important vehicle for the set of ideas aimed at debunking the supremacy of orthodox modernism. Indeed, postmodern architecture was constructed on a series of ideas developed partly – through a series of epoch-making books: Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (both 1966), as well as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) are well-known examples of seminal publications that launched postmodern architecture onto the world scene.2 Yet exhibitions such as the 1975 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, the 1978 Roma Interrotta or the 1980 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, The Presence of the Past, also played a key role in proclaiming a new sensibility in architecture, and this before most postmodern buildings saw the light of day. Less emphasized, but equally crucial, was the role

architecture periodicals such as Architectural Design (AD), Perspecta, Domus and archithese played in the shaping and disseminating of postmodern ideas and aesthetics. In an attempt to fill these discernible gaps in the history of the genesis of postmodern architecture, this book explores periodicals and exhibitions as genres, and in particular their productive and creative relationship with architecture. While in the modern era architecture was communicated, constructed and sustained by media,3 in the postmodern era the relationship between media and architecture extended beyond publicity and circulation and became intrinsic. Media preceded and/or amplified architectural work and occupied a productive role. This particular constellation had a defining influence on architecture: not because of new or previously unseen media attention to architecture, but because architecture became, within that specific period, extremely media conscious, defining itself, to a large extent, in relation to the media. In this book we argue that, between the 1960s and the 1990s, and parallel to the exploration of new directions in reaction to modernism, architecture and the media mutually sustained each other to such an extent that they became intertwined. In other words, only because of its primary dependence on images – over constructed reality – did architecture

FIGURE I.1 Installation view of the exhibition ‘The Architecture of the École des BeauxArts’. MoMA, NY, October 29, 1975 - January 4, 1976. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New  York. Photographer: David Allison (copyright The Museum of Modern Art, NY). Acc. n.: IN111.7. © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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become fully postmodern within the space of the media, and particularly through architecture exhibitions and periodicals.4 This volume gathers work, mainly produced in the context of two international conference sessions held in 2014,5 by a wide range of scholars from Europe, America and Australia. Through twelve essays, each unpacking a specific case study highlighting the intertwined relationship of media and architecture, it offers a wide-ranging investigation into the role played by exhibitions and periodicals in shaping postmodern architecture. As varied in its geographical and temporal scope as it is, this body of work elaborates one main hypothesis: exhibitions and periodicals critically shaped postmodern architecture through a series of opposite forces. As we know, the premises of postmodern architecture lie, in large part, in its paradoxical nature: the ‘both/and’ instead of the ‘or’, complexity and contradiction instead of unity and minimalism, and the tension between a local approach and an ever-expanding architecture culture. Although the apparently unresolvable question of postmodernism’s definition remains caught in this antagonism, these forces might also create a productive tension in architectural work and within discourse itself. Reinhold Martin pointed out that postmodern architecture was largely defined in terms of its representation rather than its materialization: ‘The relation between cultural forms and historical truth was problematized in architecture largely by way of experiments with representation.’6 In light of the important visual, textual and built production by architects from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, one could demonstrate that the space of production of postmodern architecture is as much inside buildings as in conveyers of its forms of representation such as exhibitions and periodicals. By looking primarily at those two media, the contributors to this book highlight and analyse the constitutive and opposite forces at play in postmodern architecture. These are no longer understood as isolated productions, but as agents shaping buildings and discourses.

Postmodernism’s paradoxical nature What do we mean by postmodern architecture and, more generally, by the term ‘postmodernism’? Almost every piece of literature on and about postmodernism starts by acknowledging the difficulty (or impossibility) of finding a universal definition for the term. Most authors start from postmodernism’s negative relationship to modernism and understand it as a critique. As such, while postmodernity describes the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization, roughly since the end of the Second World War and in reaction to the modernization that characterized the early years of the century (with the growth of the industry, the rise of the mass market, and the accelerations in automation, travel

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and mass communication), postmodernism designates a number of developments in the arts and in culture in reference to the various forms of modernism that flourished in Europe in the first half of the century. Yet the form and nature of these developments have been the object of multiple and often paradoxical understandings: postmodernism is, as such, a disputed notion. According to philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, postmodernism emerges and is made real with the collapse of universal metanarratives that had, in modernity, represented progress. Instead of a single narrative carrying out the development of the human being, Lyotard proposes a multiplicity of different and local stories that can no longer be summarized. For theorist Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, ‘the logic of informational, hyper-technological and global society which progressively took shape after the end of the reconstruction period during the 1950s’.7 Differently, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard defines the postmodern world as one in which experience and reality are codified and mediated to such a point that they have become inseparable. And, for anthropologist David Harvey, on the other hand, postmodernity brings about an undermining of the very forms of social and political organization that had supplanted traditional forms in modernity.8 If postmodernism manifested itself in almost every artistic form and area of cultural practice, its emergence made its clearest and strongest appearance in those areas in which modernism had previously been visibly defended: literature, the visual arts and, most importantly, architecture.9 In the field of architecture, postmodernism has taken different forms and colours, rendering – here as well – the precise definition of what it is somehow hard to pinpoint: ‘from the abstract idea of space and form, towards new notions of history and theory,’10 ‘historical continuity rather than rupture,’11 the unity of theory and practice, the desire for architecture to communicate, satisfying the cultural demand for symbolism, etc. For Jencks this shift is a move from the elite to the masses: ‘Modern architecture suffered from elitism. Post-Modernism is trying to get over that elitism not by dropping it, but rather by extending the language of architecture in many different ways – into the vernacular, towards tradition and the commercial slang of the street.’12 As such, what might be called central to the many definitions of postmodernism is a refusal of the value of aesthetic autonomy and the shift in attitude accompanied by a new preference for complexity over purity, plurality over stylistic integrity, and contingency or connectedness over separateness. While the definitions or interpretations of the term ‘postmodern’ remain open to multiple understandings, in this book we apply it to an architecture that defines itself through the space of the media, and, while the selection of case studies for this book is not exhaustive, it constitutes a representative sample of the different contexts for the emergence of postmodern architecture and the multiple roles exhibitions and periodicals played in relation to it.

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The essays included in this volume scrutinize the relation between the architecture media and architectural production in a threefold way. As hypothetical spaces, exhibitions and periodicals have provided an alternative to the built project, exploring a new spatial and visual culture. As discursive platforms they have enhanced transatlantic or pan-European encounters. Finally, as critical practices they have contributed to the extension of the role of the architect beyond its traditional boundaries and functioned as vehicles for disciplinary debate. Following these axes, a number of key questions are addressed: How has postmodernism manifested itself, beyond built form, by way of words, discourse and images? What might have been, in turn, the particular impact of these words, discourses and images on the built production? How is the intertwined relationship between media and architecture manifested in the postmodern era? What was the role of exhibitions and periodicals in proposing a new spatial and visual culture? To what extent are periodicals and exhibitions a response to the end of the ‘grand narrative’? Did these media offer an alternative to the building site, allowing the architect to experiment beyond the traditional boundaries of his or her profession? And how did these media contribute to what is understood today as alternative readings of architecture history? By addressing this set of questions, the present volume hopes to offer new perspectives on the multifaceted role of media as incubators for postmodern architecture. In order to fully grasp the ways in which periodicals and exhibitions have contributed to shaping postmodern architecture, we extend the postmodern period beyond its ‘traditional’ temporal boundaries. In The Language of PostModern Architecture, Jencks asserts that modern architecture died on 15 July 1972, with the demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. This book, however, explicitly goes back to the early 1960s in order to apprehend some of the forces at the origin of postmodernism’s construction in the field of architecture. By doing so, it highlights and refers, directly or indirectly, to several episodes, prior to 1972, that were no less crucial in understanding postmodern architecture’s embryological phase. For example, the appointment, in 1956, of Arthur Drexler as the MoMA’s Director of the Department of Architecture and Design; the founding, in 1964, of the Academy Bookshop in Holland Street, London, by Cypriot-born British entrepreneur Andreas Papadakis, later expanding, in 1968, into the publishing house Academy Editions; the creation, in 1967, of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), which acted as a major instigator of American postmodernism; the publication, concurrently with the 1968 worldwide movement of protest against established regimes, of Hans Hollein’s now famous ‘Alles ist Architektur’; or the arrival, in 1971, of Alvin Boyarsky as director of the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Together, these foundational events constitute a field within which architecture and media had productive encounters.

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FIGURE I.2 Box C1 of the IAUS archives at the Canadian Center for Architecture, photograph by Véronique Patteeuw, 2010.

Researching the recent past In the last few years, postmodernism has moved from a much-hated and forgotten (not to say shameful) episode in history to an era at the forefront of popular expression, critical examination and artistic production, as a renewed interest in the period has manifested itself both in academic circles and cultural institutions. A major breakthrough occurred in 2011, when the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, with Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990,13 dedicated a blockbuster exhibition to the period and/or style known as postmodernism. Since then, many other museums in Europe have turned their gaze to either a branch of postmodernism or to major personalities of the movement. In 2012, the Centre Pompidou presented La Tendenza: Italian Architecture 1965–1985,14 a show occupying 600 square metres of the Paris museum and displaying drawings and models from the Pompidou collection.15 In 2014, four major shows were held: Mission: Postmodern – Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer DAM16 at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, two exhibitions celebrating the 80th anniversary of the birth of the Viennese architect Hans Hollein,17 and TRA/BETWEEN Arte e Architettura. Roma Interrotta18 at the MAXXI museum in Rome.

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Paired with this new awareness emanating from cultural institutions, the academic world slowly extended the borders of what is called ‘history’ to include events occurring in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The number of conferences on the topic – such as the ETH symposium ‘Re-Framing Identities. Architecture’s Turn to History 1970–1990’,19 ‘The Architecture of Deregulation Postmodernism, Politics and the Built Environment in Europe, 1975–1995’ held at the KTH in Stockholm,20 and ‘Theory’s History: Challenges in the Historiography of Architecture Knowledge 196X–199X’21 at the KU Leuven – as well as the quantity of masters and PhD investigations focusing on this era are exponentially increasing, from in-depth studies of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour Learning from Las Vegas22 and Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies23 to research on Alvin Boyarsky’s role at the AA in London24 and the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale.25 These and other examples underline a renewed interest in the postmodern period and signify the need to open up the academic debate on recent history. Parallel to the current interest in the years 1960 to 1990, a critical and historical reassessment of the postmodern period has occurred, giving rise to a number of publications, each tackling a particular aspect of postmodern architecture. With Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again, Reinhold Martin offers a historical reinterpretation of postmodernism as discursive formation rather than mere style. Not a history of postmodernism but a historical reinterpretation of some of its major themes, Utopia’s Ghost analyses a series of objects and events, buildings, projects and texts, looking both at the social content and at the architectural implications of each project. Emmanuel Petit, on the other hand, insists on ‘irony’ as one of major tropes of postmodernism, while Jorge Otero-Pailos, in Architecture’s Historical Turn, looks at postmodernism through the lens of phenomenology. Other books offer a collection of previously published texts: Architecture on the Edges of Postmodernism is a collection of articles by Robert A.M. Stern, while The Postmodern Reader, re-edited by Charles Jencks in 2010, gathers writings by architects, historians, philosophers and other thinkers.26 Addressing both the important actors and their cultural productions through the specific lens of media, this volume proposes cross-readings of the period. As such, we hope a complementary perspective on postmodern architecture will emerge.

Postmodern exhibitions and periodicals as objects of study Today, architecture is studied and understood far beyond the built object: architecture as represented in the press, television, advertisements, books and, of

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course, periodicals and exhibitions; in other words, architecture as described in words and images, rather than as mere built explorations. Not only has the object of study changed, but equally the way we write and contribute to architecture history has been altered: exhibitions and periodicals play, indeed, an essential role in the rewriting of architecture history. Introducing narratives, fostering economic development and propaganda, and creating extended networks of communication, they have served as launch pads for new trends that, in turn, constructed histories. Architecture historian Jean-Louis Cohen sees exhibitions as events that can have an impact on the institutionalization of a given movement or style. And, according to Barry Bergdoll, architecture on display is a ‘medium for historical research’27 as exhibitions are becoming tools and places for dissemination, as are books, magazines and other media. Indeed, for Bergdoll, ‘curatorship is a different kind of authorship’,28 and even if exhibitions are ephemeral ‘their impact is proving increasingly consequential in the changing face of our discipline’.29 But what distinguishes exhibitions and periodicals from other media? Were they privileged forms of communication in the postmodern decades? And what was their relationship to architecture? Both exhibitions and periodicals are characterized by their ephemeral nature. While most exhibitions only last for a few months, each issue of a periodical is quickly replaced by the next. As such, both media represent temporary spaces related to a particular moment in time. And, while exhibitions and periodicals do have constraints, they act as hypothetical spaces in which the architect is not confronted with the reality of the architectural project, the client or the budget. As such, exhibitions and periodicals provide spaces of exploration where new ideas can be tested and reality can be questioned. In his writing on architecture exhibitions, architecture historian Florian Kossak approached the nature of the fine line that separates the real from the ideal. Yet for Kossak, the ideal is seen as an experimental practice, a sort of rehearsal for the real, a ‘real before the real’; in short, a laboratory. In ‘Exhibiting Architecture: the Installation as Laboratory for Emerging Architecture’, he ‘portray[s] the architecture exhibition as an integral part of the production of architecture’.30 For Kossak, if the exhibition is ‘productive’ it will provide a testing ground for the architects, allow investigation, acknowledge uncertainty and critique, and, maybe, permit the contamination of architectural praxis by other disciplines.31 Another intrinsic characteristic of exhibitions and periodicals is the possibility of a sequence. Both media have the potential to expand beyond the singular occurrence of one event or one issue. It is the very idea of the repetition of the same approach throughout time or space that renders exhibitions and periodicals more effective than other media, allowing them to react, to explore, to test and to reiterate. While an exhibition can travel and be presented in a more-or-less adapted form at different venues, the periodical can repeat the same theme within a series of consecutive issues. As such, they are not only privileged witnesses of their times but enable the active shaping of debates, movements and projects.

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Third, exhibitions and periodicals allow alternative roles for the architect. In fact, architects often take up the part of curator or editor-in-chief, assessing the collection of elements assembled or created, and accompanying it by a (critical) statement. In her PhD thesis on the 1931 German Building Exhibition (and its architecture section The Dwelling of Our Time), Wallis Miller argued that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, by being the curator of his own shows, ‘blurred the distinction between the content of the display and the context he created for it’.32 Indeed it is often in an exhibition or in a periodical that architecture is experienced in a renewed way, through the specific proposal of the curator/editor. Or, as argued in OASE’s 2012 special issue on exhibitions: ‘Architecture must indeed be curated – not as with art to cure it of its open-endedness or ambiguity, but of its matter-of-fact nature, its inconspicuous state, and of the fact that, as Walter Benjamin concisely expressed in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, it is experienced “in a state of distraction”.’33 Finally, exhibitions and periodicals are also often group endeavours. As such, the architect/curator and the architect/editor create a platform for debate and exchange, enabling cultural transfers as well as the construction and elaboration of an alternative discourse on architecture.34 In that sense, exhibitions and periodicals play a role that might extend beyond a specific place or time. The network created through and by these media might have repercussions on other, more extended spheres of the architecture profession. As exhibitions and periodicals are transient and fleeing objects, how can one study them? Exhibitions are difficult to grasp and to remember; the only widely accessible traces of their existence are the exhibition catalogues, which are generally produced before the opening of the exhibition and therefore rarely constitute an accurate testimony of the event. Other vestiges and fragments are the exhibition views found in personal or institutional archives. As for periodicals, if they continue to exist as objects – kept in libraries around the world, put in circulation through online markets or held in personal collections – they, unlike books, are the product of a very specific time, situated in the frantic rhythm of their successive issues. If one is interested in architecture media, and specifically in exhibitions and periodicals, as objects of study, should one adopt the classical methods of architecture history, explore methods used by media theory or propose a research method specific to the relationship between these two media? When approaching architecture journals and exhibitions, one examines specific curatorial approaches or particular editorial takes, inscribed within a given period and context. As such, one is able to grasp the contribution of these media to and within the history of architecture. Recent scholarship has shown, however, an interest in the examination of these media both as form and content, scrutinizing their discourse and narratives but also their materiality, their visual references, their graphic design and their architecture. Exhibitions and/or periodicals are thus considered as a prism through which we look at

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the world as well as objects of study in themselves. Following this approach, the methodology proposed in this volume is hybrid and largely based on the method of cross-reading different contents: an analysis of the ideas set out by the exhibitions and/or periodicals juxtaposed with an examination of the textual, iconographic, graphic and material manifestations. Textual elements are joined with or compared with iconographic studies; curatorial or editorial statements are combined with graphic and material proposals. If discourse is a ‘written development on a certain theme, conducted in a methodical manner’, an attempt is made to widen the concept to iconography, graphic design and materiality. Deconstructing the journal or the exhibition into its constituent elements enables us to reconstruct the position of the editors/curators and to capture the production of their positions within the editorial/curatorial space. Swiss historian Jacques Gubler defended a similar approach in his analysis of avant-garde magazines.35 By crossing the content with the form, the editorial policy with the materiality and the social distinction with the graphic design, Gubler drew an identity chart of eighty-five avant-garde magazines and, as such, of their architects/editors. Likewise, combining the material and formal aspects with the ideas they convey, the essays in this book aim to understand exhibitions and periodicals as places of production, and therefore the editorial and curatorial activities of the architects involved as practices in architecture.36 If the characteristics outlined above are, however, not specific to the postmodern era – architects have always met and exchanged ideas through the platforms offered by exhibitions and periodicals – what defines exhibitions and periodicals in the postmodern period? In other words, is there such a thing as a postmodern journal or exhibition, as opposed to a modern one? And to what extent were the postmodern media fundamental to the development of postmodern architecture? First, it can be said that exhibitions and periodicals are part of systems of communication, ruled and framed by institutions and media interfaces. These systems were amplified from the late 1970s onwards, by the creation of a certain number of key institutions and the expansion of others.37 In this context, architecture as a form of cultural production became more intimately tied up with the media of periodicals and exhibitions. The exhibition ceased to be merely an act of representation, a translation within the gallery walls, or a 1:1 scale mock-up of an architecture that existed elsewhere or was meant to exist in a near future. It could be argued that postmodern architecture was precisely constructed and defined by this system of communication, through the relentless act of exhibiting, publishing and editing. Second, in the postmodern period architecture media were influenced by the rise of the popular media. As Jean Baudrillard argued, the difference between real and unreal is no longer relevant in the postmodern period: simulacra became reality. As such, the medium is no longer a representation of reality but becomes (the place of) reality itself. To a certain extent, the same can be said of postmodern architecture. If in the modern period the media had played an important role

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for architecture’s becoming, in the postmodern period they become intertwined: mediatization of postmodern architecture has contributed to the becoming of postmodern architecture, blurring the boundaries between content and container. In other words, in the cases we are looking at here, studying the media no longer means studying an alternative space, maybe subordinate to the act of building. Postmodern architects (such as Massimo Scolari or Aldo Rossi) often choose to put emphasis on the representation, arguing for architecture’s artistic autonomy. Hence the publication of the building precedes its realization, causing a shift in the role of the medium: from the space of the representation of a project towards the space of production of the project itself. Third, the shift in the relation between real and unreal is also linked to the changing status of the architectural drawing, as it occurred from the 1970s onwards. Heralded by the 1975 The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts MoMA exhibition, the new interest in architectural drawings influenced the way architecture was exhibited, and gave rise to new networks of architecture galleries, collectors and institutions, following the rules of the art market, and the multiplication of ‘international architecture periodicals and specialist architecture publishers’. As explained by Jordan Kauffman, ‘these networks were integral to the emergence of architectural drawings as primary objects of interest, as they shifted the general perception of architectural drawings from useful objects to aesthetic ones’.38 Accompanied by the supremacy of the image as a surrogate for the building, this tendency influenced the way architecture was communicated to the public as well as the way architects represented their work. Fourth, the strong yet complex relationship between postmodern architecture and media is also affected by a triple crisis: the ideological crisis related to the demise of the Modern Movement - with capitals was paralleled by a professional crisis due to the fragmentation of the architect’s professional identity and the subsequent loss of faith and legitimacy. Within this context, architecture education faced an equally important crisis. From Paris to Milan and Rome, students questioned the rigidity and dogmatism of their pedagogical systems. Stuck between the imposed models of their teachers and their aspirations towards disciplinary renewal, young architects explored diverse forms of emancipation. As such, they used the architecture media not only as tools of propaganda but as instruments of self-education. Architecture exhibitions and periodicals enabled them to gather information, construct their positions and elaborate new paradigms.

A series of opposite forces The authors in this volume explore the spaces of the architecture exhibitions and periodicals as instruments or devices, both embedded in and alternative to the

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built reality. In doing so they argue that media are producing or constructing postmodern architecture. Addressing the plurality of the visual content – from pop to vernacular and from the eclectic to the subversive – they all observe exhibitions and periodicals as testing grounds, relating the premises of postmodern architecture to the emergence of a new architecture culture. Four major tensions are addressed and serve to define the four sections of the book: the tension between visual and material culture; the tension between core and periphery and the consequent construction of national versions of postmodernism through media; the tension between architectural practices and discourses; and, finally, the tension between the elite and the general public, through the institutionalization of postmodernism.

Part I. Postmodern Architecture’s Pursuit of a New Spatial and Visual Culture: Architecture as Image Versus Image as Architecture From handmade productions to professional journals, the relationship that links postmodern architecture to the media is situated in the tension between content and form; in other words, between architecture and its representation. Indeed, in periodicals, but also in exhibitions of the mid-1960s and 1970s, the image plays a vital role. The ‘Fantastic architecture’39 issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui had already displayed in 1962 the intertwined relationship between architecture and image. If some of the presented projects were realized – such as the structures habitacles by André Bloc – most others remained utopic proposals of a future to come. All believe, however, in the power of the image as a means to design. Facing the entangled relationship between architecture and its image, several architects adopted editorial or curatorial strategies that shaped the postmodern discourse and built production. This section focuses on the following questions. What was the relationship between form and content in magazines and exhibitions from the 1960s to the 1980s and how did these two aspects of the medium sustain each other? It is often asserted that the postmodern period ushered in the shift from architecture as space and constructed reality to architecture as image. As such, was architecture reduced to mere image, relegating spatial concerns to the background? And, if so, what was the role of provocation, irony and fantasy in these magazines? In 1965, and up to 1970, Hans Hollein took on the editorship of Bau magazine, a periodical that was, up to that date, a rather conventional publication run by the Austrian Architectural Institute. Through twenty-four different issues, Hollein’s Bau illustrated, among other things, the struggle of Austria’s post-war generation of architects for new definitions in architecture beyond function. In her contribution to this book, Eva Branscome shows how, during those years, Bau functioned as an experimental platform and a testing ground for new ideas. Indeed, using paratextual elements and non-architectural images, Hollein proposed, through the journal, an ambiguous editorial programme. The now-famous 1968 Alles ist Architektur issue can

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be seen as a paradigm in its presentation of ‘everything as architecture’ – or, in other words, in its proposal of architecture reduced to mere experience. By examining the iconographic processes of collage, montage, juxtaposition and the uncanny in Bau, Branscome explores the particularly postmodern relation between architecture and image through Hollein’s ‘manipulated views’ on Austrian architecture. A second example of an architect with editorial and curatorial ambitions is Polish-Canadian architect/educator Alvin Boyarsky. Boyarsky’s arrival at the AA in 1971, and his role as the school’s director from 1971 to 1990, opens up new perspectives on the entanglement between (the production of) images and the emergence of postmodern architecture. As Igor Marjanović highlights in his essay ‘Serial Postmodernity: Architectural Association Publications in the 1980s’, the design studios at the AA focused on the production of exhibitions and drawings as pedagogical tools. Its exhibitions programme, launched in the 1980s, presenting work by Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk. Coop Himmelblau and James Wines but also Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi, opened up a generation to ‘paper architecture’ and cultivated the drawing, not only as a form of representation but as architecture in itself. In his contribution, Marjanović explores the new role given to the architectural drawing, both as instrumental to design and as its own project. He examines the influence of these exhibited and disseminated drawings as pedagogical models for postmodern discourse, architecture education and production. On the other side of the Atlantic, a parallel tension occurred when, in 1979, the MoMA in New York organized the exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture. With this exhibition, and by the presentation of 400 buildings (almost entirely) through black-and-white photography, Arthur Drexler emphasized postmodern architecture’s diversity, plurality and eclecticism. In his essay ‘“I Decline to be a Missionary:” Late-Modern Mirrors and Transformations in Modern Architecture’, Michael Kubo explains how the curatorial tactics employed by the MoMA were essential in shaping postmodernism’s representation in the media and to the masses. The displacement from a modern unified ‘universal style’ towards an eclectic juxtaposition of images, proposed by one and the same institution, offered postmodernism its pluralist character. But it also achieved an important reduction: the buildings previously documented by plans, sections and models were now abridged and flattened into a single iconic representation.

Part II. International Postmodernisms: Micro-narratives and their Contribution to Architecture Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 thesis on the incredulity towards metanarratives concerned the status of knowledge in postmodern society. Yet the end of the

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Enlightenment’s sense of unity also translated into the rise of national identity and the affirmation, after the hegemony of the so-called International Style, of particularities within the global phenomenon of postmodern architecture. Defining the postmodern as ‘that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable’,40 Lyotard even went as far as underlining the richness of plurality, populism and eclecticism, the specificity of the local and the particular. The tension between the local and the global can be read within architecture periodicals that were both reporting on the international discourse and, in some cases, trying to pinpoint a parochial and particular postmodern reality in projects, buildings and theory. In the same way, some national cultural institutions have tried to play a role in the definition of local traditions and ramifications within postmodernism. So in an era in which architecture itself becomes more and more international as a result of cheap air travel (with the introduction of the Boeing 747 in the 1970s) and consequent cultural transfers, postmodern architects are still anchored in local (regional or national) contexts. The second section of this volume addresses the following questions: how did, in the postmodern period, exhibitions and periodicals contribute to the blossoming of local micro-narratives in architecture? In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan speaks of the ‘global village’,41 which eclipses both spatial and critical distance. In this context, were exhibitions and magazines able to widely disseminate national narratives to the newborn global (and, to a certain extent, Western-driven) architecture culture? What role did exhibitions and periodicals play in cultural transfers during the postmodern period? Can we speak of local interpretations of architecture’s ambitions leading to national versions of postmodernism? And are the architecture media enhancing these micro-narratives or, on the contrary, are they distributing them and enhancing cultural transfers? Each essay in this section emphasizes national versions of postmodernism and their relation to the more global architecture discourse of that time. In the 1960s, Finnish architect Reima Pietilä developed a particular kind of national postmodernism focusing on the relation between architecture and landscape, on the synergy between verbal and visual communication, integrating the uniqueness of Finnish nature, culture and language. This Finnish postmodernism was consolidated through a series of exhibitions organized by Pietilä between 1961 and 1974 as well as in the periodicals Le Carré Bleu and the Finnish Architectural Review. In ‘Reima Pietilä’s (Postmodern) Morphologies’, her contribution to this volume, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen shows how Pietilä brought – with his particular approach – postmodernism to Finland while shaping postmodern architecture with a specific Finnish contribution. In her essay, Pelkonen interrogates Pietilä’s use of the exhibitions and periodicals in a dual perspective: were they testing grounds for the national (or Scandinavian) elaboration of postmodern architecture or were they, conversely, used to disseminate postmodern architecture on an international level?

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Irina Davidovici proposes a second case study relevant to these questions in her paper on the Swiss journal archithese. If Switzerland always had an ambiguous relationship to postmodernism, Davidovici argues that the issues of archithese published in 1975 and 1976 were the place of the elaboration and diffusion of a specific postmodern architectural thinking, through the concept of realism. Contributions from Martin Steinmann, Bruno Reichlin, Venturi and Scott Brown, Aldo Rossi, Alan Colquhoun, and Giorgio Grassi were typical of the editorial policy of the periodical, which focused on theoretical and cultural transfers between Switzerland, Italy and the United States. In her analysis of archithese’s ‘realism’ issues, Davidovici underlines the important inclusion of both European and American influences on Swiss architecture discourse, and their elaborated continuity of modern narratives. As such, the ‘realism’ issues of archithese characterize a specific, Swiss postmodernism, related to the specific local context where it emerged. In ‘Alessandro Mendini, Domus and the Postmodern Vision (1979–1985)’, Silvia Micheli examines the production of the Milanese architecture magazine in a period in which, under the direction of Mendini, the journal became an active laboratory for the production and presentation of postmodern ideas. As Micheli argues, in the pages of Domus, postmodernism was not seen as a trend, but rather as a method of work consisting in the use of history as a ‘store’ from which to pull out inspiration. As such, the magazines promoted an understanding of design culture as constituted of fragments, parts and details, leading to a formalist architectural approach. Through his editorship of Domus and his involvement in Studio Alchimia, Mendini was able to introduce a change in Italian design culture, pushing it towards a specific Italian understanding of postmodernism.

Part III. Postmodern Architects as Thinkers: Bridging Theory and Practice Although postmodern architecture is most often defined in its relationship to popular culture and the vernacular as well as its reaching out to a broader public, another characteristic of the movement is an intrinsic, complex and vital relationship between architecture and theory. In the postmodern period architects theorized their practice, wrote for journals, joined exhibitions and established history and theory programmes at important American universities. As such, architects emphasized not only their capacities as builders but also as writers, thinkers and theorists. This theoretical turn was mainly played out in periodicals, publications and exhibitions.42 Eisenman and Tschumi wrote extensively on their deconstructivist approaches, architecture readers proposed new perspectives on the built space, and architects used the media as spaces for the critical or discursive elaboration of their practice. This third section explores the rise of architecture

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theory in the postmodern period and the role of periodicals and exhibitions in this perspective. In the particular context of Australia, two periodicals played an important role in the formation of an Australian debate on postmodern architecture and architecture theory: the Melbourne-based journal Transition (1979–2000) and Architecture Australia. Both journals were positioned at the periphery of the international architecture debate but pursued the task of mediating the increased identification of architecture with architecture discourse. In his chapter, Andrew Leach argues that, at a crucial moment in the internationalization of architecture culture and mobility, both journals functioned as vehicles in the margins. While he elaborates on the extreme dissociation between architecture theory and architectural practice at that time, Leach underlines the crucial role both journals played in the theoretical impetus on postmodern architecture in Australia. Architecture magazines and journals were important spaces for the dissemination of postmodern ideologies. As such Perspecta, the student-run journal of the Yale School of Architecture, offers a second case study for this section. Perspecta played a crucial role in the 1960s, publishing essays by Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, James Stirling and Vincent Scully that proved seminal to the emergence of postmodern architecture. In ‘Charles Moore’s Perspecta Essays: Towards Postmodern Eclecticism’, Patricia Morton focuses on three essays written by Charles Moore for Perspecta in 1960, 1965 and 1967 in which he introduces postmodern eclecticism, documents pop culture inspirations and argues for a new architecture based on commercial, historical and high culture referents. Morton analyses the significance of these three consecutive essays, wondering if they can be seen as a sequential stream of thought that Moore developed while working on his architectural projects. She also assesses what perspectives can be drawn between the theoretical stance Moore took towards such issues as history, vernacular and eclecticism in his writing and his architectural approach in projects. A third perspective on the relationship between theory and practice is offered by Elizabeth Keslacy with an examination of four issues of the English magazine Architectural Design, all devoted to the theme of classicism. Classicism, as a historical style in which the past was being interpreted, formed a model for new design strategies. In her comparative analysis of the various forms of a return to the classical in AD, Keslacy discloses the consequences of style’s ‘linguicization’ and how the new postmodern subject was constructed by it. In doing so, she confronts the magazine by asking: Can we analyse AD’s classicism issues as an educational project, as a means for the architect to educate him- or herself or a reading device? Could we relate AD to postmodernism’s re-engagement with history? By addressing these questions, Keslacy shows how, in the 1980s, AD mirrored the changing roles of the architect as writer and the architect as reader. Stéphanie Dadour, on the other hand, considers the case of essay collections published in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and the way this specific

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editorial format dealt with concepts of gender, sexuality and race. In her essay, Dadour argues that this format elicits a postmodern reading as it privileges a diversity of concepts, methods, contexts of enunciation and, as such, problematizes points where modern certainties seem at an impasse. She notes the co-existence of the proliferation of the essay collection and the emergence of a theoretical turn in the field of architecture. While this turn urged architects to redefine the representation of their role and discipline, it fostered the creation of a new figure: that of the theorist intended to, she writes, ‘deconstruct the foundations of architecture’.

Part IV. Postmodern Architecture and the Institution: Between the Elite and the Public Postmodernism went hand in hand with the mass media: by bridging high and low culture, it rendered architecture more accessible to the masses, and turned it into a consumable good via glossy magazines, television and advertisements. At the same time, with the invention of the Pritzker Prize in 1979 and the entry of architecture at the Venice Biennale the very same year, the star architect was born. Postmodern architecture – it seems – is caught in a tension between populism and elitism, between the masses and the isolated star. In this last section, we examine the increased institutionalization of architecture and the intertwined relationship between postmodern architecture and the public. Looking at the postmodern era, can we speak of a more global diffusion of architecture through its institutions? What were the specific roles played by architecture institutions such as the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, the Institut Français d’Architecture (IFA) in Paris and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, all emerging in the late 1970s or early 1980s? Finally, could we say that, with postmodernism, the focus of the media has changed from mere communication to entertainment and spectacle? With ‘Institutionalizing Postmodernism: Reconceiving the Journal and the Exhibition at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976’, Kim Förster offers a first case study for this section. His essay discusses the role of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) (1967–1985) in the architecture culture of the 1970s. As an educational and cultural facility, and as a network of scholars and research fellows, the IAUS had a huge impact on architecture education and debate, competing both with the museum and academia. But the IAUS also represented a ‘functional elite’; it not only launched many careers, but coined, according to the cultural logic of postmodernism, a celebrity culture and the current star system in architecture. Förster examines the IAUS in its production of architecture knowledge through publications and exhibitions. The postmodern narrative as elaborated on the American East Coast and in its self-legitimizing objectives had a major influence on architecture discourse on both sides of the

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Atlantic. The IAUS installed – as Förster argues – a postmodern architectural discursive form. Daniela Fabricius presents a second example with an in-depth perspective on Revision der Moderne, the first exhibition of German architecture historian and curator Heinrich Klotz, and the first on postmodernism in Germany, opened in 1984 at the German Architecture Museum (Deutsches Architekturmuseum: DAM). Klotz’s role and that of the German Architecture Museum is fundamental in understanding postmodern architecture’s conflicting attitudes towards media. Embracing both popular culture and architecture’s autonomy, Heinrich Klotz framed and exhibited postmodern architecture while exposing its paradoxical nature. This last essay emphasizes the immaterial aspect of postmodern societies ‘moving towards a dematerialized culture characterized by simulacra, information and codes, and away from a culture of authenticity, materiality and authorship’.43 And it is, in a sense, this immateriality of postmodern architecture that we would like here to unpack, through the study of ephemeral yet very material objects of study: the walls of the exhibitions and the pages of the periodicals.

Notes 1 Charles Jencks, interview with Léa-Catherine Szacka and Eva Branscome, London, 16

February 2009. 2 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 1966); Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della citta/The Architecture of the City (Padova: Marsilio, 1966); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972); Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1977). 3 See for example, Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass

Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 4 ‘In her Privacy and Publicity, Beatriz Colomina proposes a similar relationship for

the modern era, but arguing that, in the case of modern architecture, media radically displace the traditional sense of space and subjectivity.’ Colomina, Privacy and Publici. 5 Respectively the 67th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

(SAH) in Austin, Texas, and the Third European Architecture History Network (EAHN) meeting in Turin. 6 Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again (Minneapolis:

University of Minnessota Press, 2010), xv. 7

18

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, first edition in French 1979); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1992); Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin, eds, Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape (Warwick: Pickering & Chatto, 2013).

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David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

9

Michael Payne, ed., A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 428–432.

10 Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, The SAGE Handbook of

Architectural Theory (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage, 2012), 137. 11 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of

Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi. 12 Charles Jencks, The Langage of Post-modern Architecture, 3rd revised and enlarged

edition (London: Academy Edition, 1981, first edition 1977), 8. 13 This was a show curated by Jane Pavitt and Glenn Adamson which was on view at the

V&A from September 2011 to January 2012 and toured afterwards to Zurich for its Swiss edition. 14 This was curated by Frédéric Migayrou and on display at the Centre Pompidou from

20 June to 10 September 2012. 15 About the work of Rossi, and the Tendenza in general, Jencks writes: ‘On the positive

side, Rossi has contributed to the growing concern for the role of monuments in perpetuating, even defining, historical memory and the image of the city – key ideas for Post-Modernism in coming to terms with the collective, or public realm in architecture. Without a clear insistence on public symbolism – and this means monumental, permanent gestures that self-consciously articulate certain values – the image of the city becomes inchoate, the architecture evasive. But negatively, Rossi fails to understand how symbolism works, why cities and ordinary people have a perfect right to go on calling his architecture fascist even when he sees and intends it as recalling Lombardy farmhouses and the memories from his childhood.’ Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 91. 16 At Frankfurt’s Deutsches Architekturmuseum in from 10 May to 19 October 2014. 17 The exhibition HOLLEIN was organized at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) in

Vienna, from 25 June to 5 October 2014 and the exhibition Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach from 12 April to 28 September 2014. 18 Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and organized at the Fondazione MAXXI in Rome

from 17 April to 21 September 2014. 19 10–12 September 2015, ETH, gta (Institute for the History and Theory of

Architecture), Zurich, Switzerland. 20 ‘The Architecture of Deregulation Postmodernism, Politics and the Built

Environment in Europe, 1975–1995’, 10–12 March 2016, School of Architecture KTH, Stockholm, Sweden. 21 8–10 February 2017, KU Leuven, Brussels, Belgium. 22 See, for example, Valéry Didelon, La Controverse Learning from Las Vegas (Paris:

Mardaga, 2011) and Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Las Vegas: Getty Publications, 2013).

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23 See Kim Förster, ‘The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York (1967–

1985). A Cultural Project in the Field of Architecture’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Architecture (D-ARCH), ETH Zurich/Switzerland, 2011); see also Diana Agrest’s The Making of an Avant-Garde: IAUS 1967–1984, 2012. See also: https://www. makingofanavantgarde.com/the-film/ 24 See Igor Marjanović, Drawing Ambience, Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural

Association (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/RISD Museum, 2015); Irene Sunwoo, ‘Between the “Well-Laid Table” and the “Marketplace”: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments’, in Architectural Pedagogy (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, School of Architecture, 2013). 25 See Léa-Catherine Szacka, Exhibiting the Postmodern: the 1980 Venice Architecture

Biennale (Venice: Marsilio, 2016). 26 Emmanuel Petit, Irony; or, The Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Robert A.M. Stern (author) and Cynthia Davidson (editor), Architecture on the Edge of Postmodernism: Collected Essays, 1964–1988 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Charles Jencks, ed., The Post-Modern Reader, 2nd edition (London: Wiley, 2010). 27 Barry Bergdoll, ‘Curating History’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians 57, 3 (1998), 257–366, 257. 28 Bergdoll, ‘Curating History’, 257. 29 Bergdoll, ‘Curating History’, 366. 30 Florian Kossak, ‘Exhibiting Architecture: the Installation as Laboratory for Emerging

Architecture’, in Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara, Curating Architecture and the City (London: Routledge, 2009), 117. 31 Kossak, ‘Exhibiting Architecture’. 32 Wallis Miller, ‘Mies and Exhibitions’, in Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds, Mies

in Berlin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 338. 33 Christophe Van Gerrewey, Tom Vandeputte and Véronique Patteeuw, ‘The Exhibition

as Productive Space’, in OASE#88 Exhibitions: Showing and Producing Architecture (Rotterdam: NAi publishers, 2012), 1. 34 OASE#88 Exhibitions. 35 Vittorio Gregotti and Jacques Gubler, eds, ‘Architettura nelle riviste d’avanguardia/

Architecture in the Avant-Garde Magazines’, Rassegna IV, 12 (December 1982), 4–88. 36 Hélène Jannière and France Van Laethem, ‘Essai méthodologique: les revues, source

ou objet de l’histoire de l’architecture?’, in Hélène Jannière, France Van Laethem and Alexis Sornin, eds, Revues d’architecture dans les années 1960–1970 (Montréal: IRHA, Institut de Recherche en Histoire de l’Architecture, 2008), 60–61. 37 For example, in 1979 Phyllis Lambert created the Canadian Center for Architecture

(CCA) in Montreal while the Venice Biennale created the architecture sector of the institution and the Max Protetch Gallery in New York started exhibiting architecture drawings; also in 1979, Heinrich Klotz founded the German Architecture Museum (Deutsches Architekturmuseum: DAM) in Frankfurt, which opened to the public in 1984; the Netherland Architecture Institute in Rotterdam was created a few years later, in 1988.

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38 Jordan Kauffmann, ‘Architecture in the Art Market: The Max Protetch Gallery’,

Journal of Architecture Education 70, 2 (2016), 257–268, 257. 39 ‘Architectures fantastiques/Fantastic architecture’, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 102

(June–July 1962). 40 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ in Charles

Jencks, ed., The Post-modern Reader (London: Academy Edition, 1992), 148. 41 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1964; reprinted London: Routledge, 2008) 42 Véronique Patteeuw, Architectes sans architecture (PhD dissertation, ENSA Paris-

Malaquais, 2016); Jean-Louis Cohen, La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie (Bruxelles: Mardaga, 2015). 43 Daniela Fabricius, ‘Image, Medium, Artefact: Heinrich Klotz and the Postmodern

Architecture Museum’, in this volume.

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PART I

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE’S PURSUIT OF A NEW SPATIAL AND VISUAL CULTURE: ARCHITECTURE AS IMAGE VERSUS IMAGE AS ARCHITECTURE

1 BAU MAGAZINE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEDIA (1965–1970) EVA BRANSCOME

Read (if you know where to find a copy) that slim, sophisticated Viennese magazine Bau edited by Hans Hollein, Oswald Oberhuber and Gustav Peichl, and you will enter a world of architectural fun, fantasy and wit. Nothing is rigid, nothing is fixed in their vision of what constitutes architecture or arouses architectural interest – their recent issue Alles ist Architektur is an audacious array of images, ranging from an equivocal lip-stick tip, through Claes Oldenburg and Christo compositions, to cut-out patterns for our inflated and tented structures of the future. Association is free and uninhibited.1 By the time Architectural Design (AD) featured this review of Bau in 1968, the radical reincarnation of the hitherto Der Bau was already three years old. From the mid-1960s, Bau became the main organ to promote the new generation of Austrian architects. While their projects were still largely conceptual, with very few of them actually being built, the magazine created a forum to discuss the thresholds of architecture. In Vienna, avant-garde architecture existed not as buildings, but as media: in Bau, architecture became above all a form of communication, disseminated through print. It was this blurring of disciplines that makes this publication important for the analysis of postmodernism, and not merely in terms of architecture. Media was implicated in the project of postmodernism from the outset. In Bau, from 1965, the merging of architecture and media – understanding them as interchangeable and inseparable – was an important precursor for subsequent developments within architectural postmodernism, as constructed, staged and publicized from the mid-1970s by its key propagators, Charles Jencks, Paolo Portoghesi and Heinrich Klotz.

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FIGURE 1.1 The twenty-four issues of Bau magazine that were published from 1965 to 1970 represented a hybrid rethinking of architecture. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld.

The remaking of Bau Bau magazine, for those privileged to have seen one of its rare issues, surprises with its sleek A4-format, separate advertisement sections and product placement, all in stark contrast to the avant-garde content (Figure 1.1). Unlike Archigram or many other little magazines of that era, it was not handmade, nor did it experiment with format. Bau had the appearance of a conventional professional publication, even if it was never a genuinely commercial magazine like AD. Instead, Bau was hybrid: it looked like one thing but did something else, and in this sense was unusual and subversive. It evolved out of the official publication for the Austrian architectural institute Zentralvereinigung der Architekten Österreichs (ZVA), which had existed since 1907, and which had published a magazine since 1925. The original title was Der Bau, and it is worth trying to imagine the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Journal or The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Journal changing their formats in the mid-1960s to be like the new Bau. If postmodernism was about bringing communication back into architecture, Bau must be understood as a postmodern phenomenon in that it overthrew conventional architectural communication. In this regard it acted as a Trojan horse within the architectural establishment, being paid for via subscription by members of the Austrian institute; yet through that channel, Bau was also acquired by the international libraries where copies still survive today. The magazine’s takeover in 19652 was triggered by a leading architectural educator, Günther Feuerstein, who wrote to the ZVA complaining that their existing magazine was outdated and boring. The architect Hans Hollein was of the same opinion and directly approached the president who replied that if he really thought he could do better, then he should do it himself. On 11 March 1965, Hollein, together with Feuerstein and a new editorial team,3 that contained among others Gustav Peichl and later Walter Pichler, relaunched the magazine. Neither the editors nor the contributors were paid for their work, the magazine being driven solely by dedication and passion.4 Over the years the editorial board fluctuated, yet Hollein can be considered its main protagonist. Hollein, who had never been an easy person to work with, was there from the beginning and remained until the very end of Bau, eventually becoming the sole editor. Much of Bau’s content was shaped and guided by Hollein’s ideas, which were eventually collated in its pages in 1968 in his famous manifesto, ‘Alles ist Architektur’ (‘Everything is Architecture’). Yet Bau was a collaboration of architects who shared a discontentment with and critique of the conditions in post-war Austria, sitting on the hem of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Immediately below the first editorial, the new editors penned a mission statement of the group: The new BAU We want to report, discuss and

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show new directions We want quality in architecture We take a position We bring architectural theory and criticism to building practice We report on social and political problems within architecture We show completed buildings, projects and architectural competitions We feature contributions by leading foreign personalities within the field of architecture We are not the mouthpiece of an organization We are an independent editorial team, that while sharing the basic ideas will often be representing different opinions The Editors5 The cover showed a collage of nine images. At its centre, Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! was surrounded by projects by the editors (Hollein, Peichl and Pichler). Also on the cover featured a photograph of a model of Van den Broek and Bakema’s auditorium at TU Delft, Bakema having also contributed with an article. The other images were of the Verrazano Bridge in New York, the Giza pyramids, and the Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, taken from Scientific American. The message was clear: architecture was explosive, architecture was international, and it belonged to these young Austrians. Yet architecture was also ancient and archaic. It was about structure and infrastructure, and it was also about politics and war. The new Bau had a phenomenal impact.6 It sold out within five days and a further 1,000 issues were printed due to popular demand. But it also had a polarizing effect. Before the second issue went to print, thirteen individuals cancelled their subscriptions in shock. Their departure was more than compensated, though, by several hundred new subscribers, including sixty students. Some criticized the revamped Bau for its avant-garde content, for being radical and fantasist, and for being self-promoting and Vienna-centric. Others, however, lauded the publication, including Vienna’s deputy mayor Heinrich Drimmel and Professor Clemens Holzmeister, who had taught Hollein and Peichl at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. And it immediately received positive attention internationally. Encomiums were cited in Bau from Ulrich Conrads, Frei Otto, the German

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publisher Gerd Hatje, Edgar Kaufmann, the Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg and the American architecture historian Albert Bush-Brown, as well as the German architectural theorist Jürgen Joedicke. The maverick editor of Landscape magazine, J.B. Jackson, wrote: ‘I must congratulate you and your colleagues on a handsome and stimulating piece of work.’ Jackson had been teaching at Berkeley7 when Hollein was there as an exchange student from 1959 to 1960, and although American he had a German-speaking background so could appreciate the written content. A courageous and drastic change made by the new editors was to consolidate the advertisement sections at the front and back of each issue, where the pages were of high-quality glossy paper and in colour. In contrast, the main pages were printed black on low-quality recycled paper that was usually white, but sometimes also blue, green or pink. This bifurcation allowed readers to completely ignore the advertisements, which seems curious for a periodical financed solely by advertisements and subscription fees: there were no subsidies or other finances to fall back on.8

Hans Hollein and the Austrian variant of postmodernism I wish to propose, through this discussion of Bau, an enhanced understanding of postmodernism not as a style but as a palimpsest of cultural conditions, in certain respects following Jean-François Lyotard’s diagnosis.9 Rather than describing postmodernism as a singular phenomenon, it must be seen as a plural condition that emerged in response to a very particular cultural context of that time. In this instance, the historical enquiry centres upon Hans Hollein, who by the late 1970s became implicated in postmodernism through the efforts of Charles Jencks, especially his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture10 and his work as an AD editor. Next, the work of Hollein was displayed prominently at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale in the exhibition The Presence of the Past. That event was simultaneously the first-ever international architecture exhibition at the Biennale and also the launching pad for postmodern architecture as a public spectacle, drawing in huge crowds and considerable media attention.11 In 1984, Hollein’s projects were again featured as exemplary of the new approach when, as a process of musealization, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum opened in Frankfurt as an initiative of Heinrich Klotz. Thus, to understand Hollein’s involvement in media, communication and postmodernism, one needs to appreciate his role as co-founder and primary editor of Bau magazine. And to do so, one has to trace those cultural manifestations in post-war Austria which created the soil from which postmodernism emerged.

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Looking back, the Second World War had created a deep sense of cultural dislocation for Austria. Between 1918 and 1955, Austria’s metanarratives, the big stories that had underpinned its history, power structures, and ultimately its sense of identity, were systematically obliterated. Austria lost an empire after the First World War and consequently shrunk from a population of 53 million to under 7 million. While the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire had incorporated around a dozen languages, the remnant nation-state was left with just the one spoken by ethnically German Austrians. Austria disastrously became part of Greater Germany in 1938 after the Nazi Anschluss. From 1945 to 1955, under Allied occupation, Austria did not even exist as a state. By the time it regained statehood and a constitution, the Cold War had started in earnest and Austria was a buffer zone. Understanding the role of religion is important too, because religious institutions carried such power and control: much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had lain within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1968, approximately 88 per cent of the Austrian population remained staunchly Catholic12 but, like the political and territorial shifts, post-war Catholicism also underwent a massive transformation, with the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council restructuring practices and hierarchies. The collapse of metanarratives, however, formed the basis for a new cultural condition in which architecture played an important part. Austria lay in ruins, literally and culturally. It needed to be rebuilt, and this was after all what young architects of the post-war era were trained to do. But where to start? Which ideas to follow? Other Western countries readily adopted modernism after the war, but in Austria there was simply a vacuum. On a basic level, young Austrians were desperate to reconnect with the history preceding the Anschluss and Greater German Reich. While Austria had been a leader in architectural developments from the early twentieth century well into the interwar years, now there was amnesia – a remnant from the Nazi era.13 Bau addressed this dearth of information with a plethora of articles about Austrian architectural modernism, with features on the émigré Rudolph Schindler,14 Wiener Werkstätte,15 Wittgenstein Haus,16 Otto Wagner and his school,17 Josef Hoffmann18 and Adolf Loos.19 Numerous articles also addressed the difficulties being experienced by the postwar generation in finding their way to a new architecture, describing the developments in Vienna20 and Graz.21 Hollein stated explicitly in an editorial: ‘Bau [is] committed to the history of Austrian architecture’.22 Reconnecting with history and the city were obvious characteristics associated with postmodern architecture (for example Rossi, Venturi and Scott Brown), but Bau fused this with an intense search for post-war Austrian national identity that could go beyond yodelling and Lederhosen. In terms of this modernizing mission, it is strange that Bau intentionally omitted any commemoration of the likes of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. As Hollein explained:

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BAU is not necessarily a congratulator and celebrator of festivities, and the fact that something happened 100 years ago does not necessarily mean a stimulation, whatever special significance the number one hundred may conjure. Because of this, BAU has not always considered it necessary to celebrate anniversaries, or to take the respective deaths of Mies or Gropius as an occasion for special attention. Not that BAU does not appreciate these pioneers or misunderstands their importance. Others have observed this ‘current event’, BAU will acknowledge it when it has become mature in its overall program and development.23 The twenty-four issues of Bau published from 1965 to 1970 therefore portray like no other record the struggle that post-war Austrian architects went through to discover themselves. Most strikingly, the magazine was from the outset adamant to find new definitions for architecture beyond function-driven international modernism. This critique was evident in the first issue in 1965 via Günther Feuerstein’s manifesto, ‘Funktion: Provokation’, which declared: 1. Functional architecture: first relief from ballast (historical forms, for

which one then again longs, unacknowledged) and the birth of new concepts. Then apology and embarrassment: the impotence to create signs and to erect monuments. 2. Functionalist architecture: the answer to our idleness, mechanical order

of being. Liquidation of fantasy, imagination, vision, intuition. The thinking of the architects exhausts itself in scientific calculations, studies of function, walk lines, construction details. 3. Function-driven architecture: I eat here and there I sleep. Here I work and

there I read. The architect has thought it through well. Everything works. Where do I laugh and where do I cry? Where do I hate and where do I breathe? Where do I experience expanse and narrowness, grandeur and powerlessness, protection and freedom? 4. Architecture: not just space for one sector of life. Space for the whole life,

the whole person.24 Feuerstein’s attack on functionalism was due to its incapacity to answer quintessential needs of human existence, plus its failure to address historical memory and act as signifiers for culture and meaning. As early as 1958 he published his ‘Thesen zur inzidenten Architektur’ (‘Theses for an Incidental Architecture’) articulating his discontent.25 Nor was he alone in such sentiments. The first coordinated disaffection had been expressed publicly in 1958 at a Catholic retreat of artists and architects organized by Monsignore Otto Mauer. There the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser declared his ‘Verschimmlungsmanifest gegen den Rationalismus’ (‘Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture’), and the artists Markus Rrachensky and Arnulf Rainer presented their manifesto on ‘Architektur mit den

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Händen’ (‘Architecture by Hand’).26 While these critiques were thus the currency for rethinking Austrian architecture among niche groups of artists, architects and educators, Bau enabled a widening of the discourse to include mainstream architects who subscribed to the ZVA’s magazine. International audiences were also penetrated, not necessarily through writing, given the language barrier, but through Bau’s provocative visual culture. Attacks on modernism were considered the fundamental prerequisite to the subsequent cultural phenomena known as postmodernism, but in the cultural milieu of post-war Austria these critiques emerged simultaneously with the first international modernist buildings in the country in the late 1950s. Why this parallel? Unlike in Germany or elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s, there had been no modernization of the architectural production in Austria because the Czech Republic – which had contained nearly all Austria-Hungary’s industry – became part of independent Czechoslovakia from 1918. Interwar Austria was to all intents a non-industrialized nation. For all the bravura of the socialist municipality in ‘Red Vienna’, the country at large had a very conservative and traditional culture, which Nazism helped to reinforce. Then, in the late 1950s, into the Austrian void stepped ‘International Style’ modernism, stemming from the United States of America. Yet among the sharpest younger architects in Austria there was immediate suspicion. Had there not just ended one era of architectural colonization, under the Nazis, so why then should Austria ‘surrender’ to yet another, by the Americans? Hollein wrote in Bau 5/6 in 1965, for an issue dedicated to US architecture: While the ‘International Style’ continues to dominate the US scene in the years after the war, and the Miesian discipline exercises its tremendous influence on the thinking of architects or just perhaps the surfaces of their buildings, and architecture education at the leading schools owes a lot to the influence and the teachings of Gropius and the Bauhaus, different tendencies are becoming evident since the late 1950s. These are either in reaction to the general trend, or persistent currents finally emerging that had already been developing underground for a long time.27 Hollein was here arguing that even in America it was not only about accepting universal modernism: it was possible to progress beyond a movement that had ossified into a style, and which was now obsessed simply with the look of skin-deep façades. His article on the United States contained a visual collision of architectural stimuli, erasing boundaries between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture. Hollein juxtaposed technological components with the Grand Canyon, a Pueblo in Taos (and its Native American creators) with Unity Temple (and its creator Frank Lloyd Wright) and the Richards Medical Building in Philadelphia by Louis Kahn. A double spread of contemporary American architecture designed by an overtly émigré contingency

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such as Eero Saarinen (TWA Building), Mies van der Rohe (Crown Hall), Richard Neutra (Heath House), Rudolph Schindler (Lovell House) and Frederick Kiesler (Endless House) was followed by images from US pop culture including a CocaCola advertisement, a cowboy, God’s Own Junkyard, the same image of Marilyn Monroe repeated three times, the Twentieth Century Fox logo, the Ku Klux Klan, a dollar bill, Main-Street-USA, headlights, a juke-box, Jack Kennedy, Mount Rushmore, a New York City skyline, a Model-T Ford, another cowboy, and finally an air-conditioning unit. The next double spread showed the façade of Lake Shore Drive on the one side and Mies van der Rohe with his famous quote, ‘Less is More’, on the other. The final double spread was about space technology with an astronaut, a rocket, a satellite dish and a space-frame collaged with road infrastructure of a spaghetti junction, a cabling cluster and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Figure 1.2). For Hollein, American architecture was really about media, pop culture, indigenous culture, settler culture and nationalistic extremes. It was about cityscapes and landscapes and car culture, technology, infrastructures, politics and sex – not just about ‘International Style’ tower blocks. Two years later, in Bau 3 (1967), he explained more about the situation in Austria: The time of the fifties and early sixties and its challenges seems almost incomprehensibly distant, when just a very few took up their struggle and

FIGURE 1.2 Bau 5/6 (1965): Space travel promised new possiblities for architecture as a threshold to the built environment, including media and communication. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld.

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endeavour to establish a Modern architecture, for an honest attitude and sincerity and for a conception of the future. Of course the word has now spread that one must wear ‘modern’, one is clad in curtain-wall or exposed concrete and conducts some structural gymnastics, this has even penetrated the universities and some foreign bodies have even managed to establish themselves there. After 1945 most started over where they had left off in 1945. And only a very few tried to work through to new ways and ideas.28 While Bau blatantly objected to unreservedly adopting international modernism from elsewhere, it simultaneously felt the urgency to foster international exchange to find out what was going on abroad, and in return to show them what Austria was doing.29 The magazine successfully attracted an international readership, a surprising fact given that most of the writing was in German. While some articles appeared in English, it was Bau’s visual appeal that made the content comprehensible even to those who did not read the language.30 In this sense, it is predictable that most writings to date on Bau have focused on the ‘Alles ist Architektur’ issue, Bau 1/2 (1968), such a clear expression of Hollein’s stance, and possibly visually the most seductive of all. The content could be understood through the titillating juxtaposition of illustrations even if the German text remained obscure.

Architecture as a media construct Perhaps more important still were Bau’s links between a small central European country and the bigger discussions about communication systems taking place elsewhere. On the other side of the Atlantic, especially, the mid-1960s was a time in which media was being rethought. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, with its key chapter entitled ‘The medium is the message’. McLuhan turned common thinking on its head by proclaiming that it was the carrier of content that was of primary importance, rather than the content itself. He went further, to suggest that the technology of distributing information was intimately linked to what constituted human environments: The section on ‘the medium is the message’ can, perhaps, be clarified by pointing out that any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.31 McLuhan expanded: As our proliferating technologies have created a whole series of new environments, men have become aware of the arts as ‘anti-environments’ or 34

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‘counter-environments’ that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself.32 And: The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race’. Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system’, as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. If art is an ‘early warning system’, to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.33 McLuhan wanted art to be understood in terms of its relationship to media. For him, art was a conduit of communication alongside clothing, housing, money, comics, transportation, photographs, advertisements, film, radio, television, spoken/written/printed words, telephones and weapons. Hollein’s thinking on what constituted architecture was strikingly similar. Indeed, his display panels for the controversial 1963 exhibition, Architektur: Work in Progress, defined as architecture technology, politics, religion, transportation, the body, human suffering, fashion and sex.34 Hollein believed that architecture was media, writing in Bau 4 (1966): Limited and traditional definitions of what constitutes architecture and the means of her expression have now largely lost their validity. Today, in a sense, everything is architecture. Our focus and efforts are now the ‘environment’ [English word used] as a whole, and the media that determine it. The dress of the woman walking through the street, as well as artificially created climate, the TV programme or the dwelling. Not as objects of ‘artistic’ production, but as an extension of our resources and the human realm. A number of tasks and problems are now only solved be means of ‘architecture’ for sake of convention. But is the answer to many questions still ‘architecture’ as she was once understood? Or are there now not more appropriate media at our disposal. According to the definition of McLuhan, dwelling is a means to control body temperature, and it was attempted to perfect this through building for thousands of years. The most perfect architecture of this kind, is however, the space suit. An architecture that liberates us from the ‘built living environment’, and also makes possible whole new sets of relationships of people to each other and also to space. The ‘building’ is changing its definition.

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Bau – as a journal for architecture and urban design – will also be addressing the wide variety of media, which often more suitably than built things – define and determine our behaviour and our surroundings in space.35 Hollein had been preoccupied with media since his career started. In 1965 he described the telephone booth as a minimal media environment, making global communications possible.36 By 1966 he proposed television as an extension to the University of Vienna.37 And in 1967 he declared: ‘Architecture is a medium of communication’.38 His celebrated Bau issue on ‘Alles ist Architektur’ therefore just fused and expanded these concepts.39 Hollein had been to the United States in 1963 to 1964 as a visiting professor at Washington University, just when McLuhan’s seminal tome was published, and again in 1966 teaching at Yale and several other universities. Yet Hollein was not simply following in McLuhan’s footsteps. When citing the Canadian academic in the fourth Bau issue in 1966, it was not so much an act of imitation, but in support for his own case. Yet it would be wrong to portray Bau as a homogeneous publication dedicated to contemporary media theory. Its content was in a permanent state of change and transition. On the one side, it sought to reposition architecture beyond functionalism by rediscovering Austrian architecture’s pre-war history – hence one whole issue was dedicated to Schindler. It presented artworks where they informed architecture, and it featured experimental projects and brought in international examples, contributions and exposure. The pressures for a mainstream, commercial agenda were always present as well. There was a disjunctive oscillation between the avant-garde and more conventional content. Indeed, the issue directly preceding ‘Alles ist Architektur’ was guest-edited by Oswald Mathias Ungers, and readers complained that it was too dry. The issue before the Ungers magazine had been dedicated to the ZVA’s 60th anniversary, with many feeling there had not been enough illustrations.40 Entertainment had definitely become part of the expectation of Bau’s readership.

‘Alles ist Architektur’ Hollein’s contributions to Bau were always like setting light to tinder. So, if his readers were demanding more illustrations and more entertainment, he provided it immediately through the ‘Alles ist Architektur’ issue, which comprised one page of written manifesto followed by seventeen pages of provocative, sexually suggestive images. Some of his messages in the piece were already familiar, such as Hollein’s linking of architecture with figures of power, politics, fashion and history. Two pages situated Hollein’s early collages of defamiliarized objects within the Pop Art context of Claes Oldenburg, Christo and Robert Morris. Conventional boundaries between architecture and painting were tested in a double spread of artworks

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by Magritte, Duchamp and El Lissitzky. But most shocking must have been the implication that architecture could be about protest, drugs, advertisement and sex. Che Guevara was juxtaposed to an early Hollein sketch of a skyscraper shaped as a fist, and there was a photograph of the painter Hundertwasser protesting nude against current architectural trends. Hollein’s project for the ‘Nonphysical Environmental Control Kit’ from 1967 showed unambiguously that the desired environmental modifications could be created merely by popping a pill. However, Hollein’s idea that a woman’s body constituted an architectural space was new. His feature showed women over and over again in terms of their sexuality but also as things and products. A woman sucking on a straw, semi-dressed, nude; a woman forming a landscape in an American tyre advertisement; a woman as a cathedral of entertainment in Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt’s inflatable ‘SHE’ project. On one page, Hollein juxtaposed a photograph of Otto Mühl’s 1965 ‘Materialaktion’ which paralleled the commodification of the female body with capitalist overconsumption, showing an image of garbage-strewn New York streets during a strike. Then, finally, there was a recumbent female body ‘drawn’ by means of 1960s computer technology. This use of the female body was not unique to Bau magazine. Archigram, for example, also used an abundance of girls in mini-dresses and boots to enliven their projects. The boundaries between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation were fuzzy. New, however, in Bau was toying with the concept of advertising and its implications for architecture. Peter Weibel described vividly the transgressions of artistic output on this threshold of culture in his 1966 essay ‘Zeit der Transition: Avantgarde zwischen Kunst und Massenkultur’ (‘Time of Transition: Avant-Garde between Art and Mass Culture’): Today the artist has become an advertiser [English word used]. He dispenses with community and gallery and goes to the department store. In search of the consumer (and not in search of the hero of former times) he impersonates the entertainer [English word used], because he knows that art is only consumed as fun. His artistic universe is the billboard, the world of the magazine and that of consumption: he needs to be within mass distribution. He does not pretend to be individual either in terms of creativity or reception, or even in his product. He knows his work is a commodity. Only the artistic complexity of his output elevates it above the mass-produced articles and possibly unmasks the shark in the swimming pool. Situated between Harper’s Bazaar and Pravda, he sides with Harper and mimics the position of affirmation, because where totalitarianism is administered or circulated and creativity or consumption are anonymous, the artist can only smuggle the critical into consciousness in the flamboyance of baby pink and Acapulco.41 Hollein’s issue on ‘Alles ist Architektur’ teetered in more ways than one on the margins of consumer culture. Perhaps the most obvious sign was the fact that while

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his written manifesto was printed on low-quality recycled paper, the visuals were on coated paper – reserved in previous Bau issues for the advertisement pages. Many of Hollein’s images were lifted from advertisements, with the credits listing Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle as well as Revlon, BF Goodrich and Jantzen.42 It showed clearly how the magazine flirted between complicity and subversion. Was Bau countercultural, or was it a marketing campaign within a cynical system of commodification?

The significance of Bau As already noted, media and communication were important drivers for postmodernism, and in this regard McLuhan’s books and Hollein’s ideas predated and anticipated this realization. Postmodernism was essentially a critique of modernism, a questioning of taste-culture, a need to reconnect with history and the city, a call for cross-cultural intersections, and the opening up of the boundaries between architecture and other creative practices. Bau engaged, through its unpredictable and fluctuating contents, with all these aspects. Like postmodernism, it was deeply hybrid, escaping by its kaleidoscopic approach any clear definition. By the mid-1960s the overlapping of media and architecture was intensifying in other countries as well. One of the most significant publications was Archigram in London. Like Bau in Vienna, this magazine was a medium of creative architectural practice, an alternative to building in a situation where young architects had difficulty in realizing their projects. Hollein first became aware of Archigram in 196443 when in New York. He was visiting Philip Johnson, who had started to collect his collages. Johnson showed Hollein an Archigram issue that Reyner Banham had just given him, and which contained one of Hollein’s drawings, already hanging in the Museum of Modern Art.44 Hollein saw immediately the common ground with Archigram, and made contact with the magazine. This set in motion an exchange where Archigram would send items they were working on, and vice versa. Hence the interface between Hollein and Archigram was in no way a one-off episode, or merely coincidental, but on the contrary was sustained.45 Their interchange of ideas ranged from disenchantment with modernism to a preoccupation with cities, self-contained pods, non-physical environments offered by pills, and other corporal/mental/psychological spatial experiences (Figure 1.3). While stemming from different cultural conditions, the Viennese and London protagonists shared a disinterest in direct political engagement, much preferring architectural action. Architecture was the message, regardless of whichever media, now that architecture had become media. Their international dialogue was initially through Archigram and then through AD, for which Hollein effectively functioned as a foreign correspondent from 1967 to 1969. AD continued to publish his work throughout the Robin Middleton era into

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FIGURE 1.3 Bau 1 (1965): Hollein’s contribution to this first issue foresees architecture as deeply embedded in self-contained post-apocalyptic scenarios, juxtaposing his work to a space station from Life magazine and Archigram’s ‘Walking City’. Copyright Nachlass Hans Hollein + Archiv ZV Wien, NÖ, Bgld.

the 1970s, so the trajectory through to Charles Jencks, who became an AD editor in 1977, is evident. Hollein’s attempt to transform architecture therefore came via his innovative use of media, not subtly, but in an explicit manner. In 1968 he explained to Bau’s readership: In the four years of its existence the new Bau has focused on an international orientation and has established international distribution. Bau has introduced new concepts and trends in architecture, has promoted a new outlook and attitude regarding the terms ‘architecture’ and ‘to build’ – an outlook that includes all surroundings and all media and disciplines used to determine human ‘environments’ [English word used]. Bau has thus helped to shape an expanded definition of architecture, as well as attempting to create a new type of ‘architecture’ magazine. The development of recent years has proved us right. Passionate discussions surrounding new media and definitions are taking place within architectural circles, and when we look around us the appearance of many architecture journals is changing

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and new ones are arriving on the scene, many of which are dedicated to this expanded definition of architecture.46 Bau was mainly financed through advertisements, yet eventually its content no longer had any relevance to actual building; it became too artistic, theoretical and controversial. And so the advertisements were slowly withdrawn.47 Hollein eventually resigned in 1970, after which the magazine changed back to a more conventional format, and after only two further issues was discontinued. Hollein’s role as an editor for Bau was aimed at redefining architecture for the second half of the twentieth century. He wanted an architecture that could move on from the aesthetics and function-fixation of the ‘International Style’, which he considered redundant and no longer appropriate for post-war conditions. Many of the tactics Hollein used coincided with Charles Jencks’s later definition of postmodernism, while the attention paid to history and the city paralleled Paolo Portoghesi’s fundamental understanding of the new approach. Likewise, Heinrich Klotz was fascinated by local heritage issues in Germany and the work that a group of younger American architects were starting to produce in the 1950s that did not fit the context of international modernism. This was precisely why Hollein, so eager for international exchange, was readily co-opted into the postmodernist agenda of these three leading polemicists, as they enacted the triadic media of print, exhibition and museum. Today, the subject of postmodernism remains contentious within architecture discourse, yet the links with media are increasingly understood. Situated on the periphery of Western culture, Bau offered a perplexing combination of architectural subversion and the dismantling of disciplinary boundaries, a desperate need to join international debates, and an intense preoccupation with architecture as a form of communication. While a precursor to what eventually erupted in the late 1970s as the media extravaganza of postmodern architecture – either celebrated or reviled – Bau magazine today can undoubtedly be understood as a significant enabler of that change.

Notes 1

‘Architecture Locked in, the City Locked Out’, Architectural Design 7 (1968), 300.

2

Eugen Wörle, Editorial, Bau 1 (1965), 1.

3

This editorial team initially included Gustav Peichl, Walter Pichler and Sokratis Dimitriou.

4

See Craig Buckley’s interview with Hans Hollein in Vienna on 18 August 2006. In Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley, eds, Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X (Barcelona: Actar/Princeton University, 2010), 378.

5

The Editors, ‘Der neue BAU’, Bau 1 (1965), 1: my translation from German.

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6

‘Pro und Kontra’, Editorial, Bau 2 (1965), 33.

7

Liane Lefaivre, ‘Everything is Architecture’, Harvard Design Magazine 18 (2003), 4.

8

Liane Lefaivre, ‘Everything is Architecture’, 33.

9

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, in Charles Jencks, ed., The Post-Modern Reader (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2011), 38–53.

10 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy

Editions, 1977; plus numerous subsequent editions). 11 Lea-Catherine Szacka, ‘The Presence of the Past: Postmodernism Meets in Venice’, in

Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, eds, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–90 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 132–135. 12 See Statistik Austria: Die Informationsmanager, ‘Bevölkerung nach

Religionsbekenntnis und Bundesländern 1951 bis 2001’, http://www.statistik.at/ web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gesellschaft/bevoelkerung/volkszaehlungen_ registerzaehlungen_abgestimmte_erwerbsstatistik/bevoelkerung_nach_ demographischen_merkmalen/022885.html [accessed 9 January 2018]. 13 Hans Hollein in interview with Horst Christoph and Patricia Grzonka for Profil Online,

26 March 2009. https://www.profil.at/home/stararchitekt-hollein-interview-jedewoche-denkmalamt-237070 [accessed 1 February 2013: my translation from German]. 14 Hans Hollein, ‘Rudolph M. Schindler’, Bau 4 (1966), 67–82. 15 Hans Hollein, ‘Die Wiener Werkstätte’, Bau 3 (1967), 75. 16 Various articles in Bau 1 (1969), 2–10. 17 Otto Antonio Graf, ‘Die vergessene Wagnerschule’, Bau 1 (1969), 11–15. 18 Hans Hollein, Editorial, Bau 1 (1970), 1 and Herbert Thurner, ‘Zum 100. Geburtstag

Josef Hoffmanns’ Bau 1 (1970), 21 and Hans Hollein, ‘Haus Wiener (Wertheim), USA, ca. 1928 JOSEF HOFFMANN’, Bau 1 (1970), 22–27. 19 Various articles in Bau 1 (1970), 1–20. 20 Bau 2/3 (1969). 21 Bau 4/5 (1969). 22 Hollein, Editorial, Bau 1. 23 Hollein, Editorial, Bau 1: my translation from German. 24 Günther Feuerstein, ‘Funktion: Provokation’, Bau 1 (1965), 20–23: my translation

from German. 25 Günther Feuerstein, ‘Thesen zur inzidenten Architektur (1958)’, in Otto Breicha

and Gerhard Fritsch, eds, Aufforderung zum Misstrauen (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1967). 26 Robert Fleck, Avantgarde in Wien. Die Geschichte der Galerie nächst St. Stephan. Wien

1954–1982. Kunst und Kunstbetrieb in Österreich (Vienna: Löcker-Verlag, 1982), 558 (endnote 2) and 96. 27 Hans Hollein, ‘US-Architekten’, Editorial, Bau 5/6 (1965), 125: my translation from

German.

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28 Hans Hollein, Editorial, Bau 3 (1967), 53: my translation from German. 29 ‘Der neue BAU’. 30 Considering the interest in the role that twentieth-century publications played

in disseminating important new architectural concepts, it is surprising that little attention has yet been paid to Bau’s explosive contents. Liane Lefaivre and Craig Buckley have focused mainly on Bau 1/2 (1968). Liane Lefaivre, ‘Everything is Architecture’, 1–5. Craig Buckley, ‘From Absolute to Everything: Taking Possession in “Alles ist Architektur”’, Grey Room 28 (2007), 108–122. 31 Marshall McLuhan, Preface to the 3rd Printing, Understanding Media: The Extensions

of Man (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), vi. 32 McLuhan, Preface, viii. 33 McLuhan, Preface, x. 34 Hans Hollein, ‘Architektur – work in progress’, Bau 2/3 (1969), 7. 35 Hans Hollein, ‘Vorstoß und Rückstoß’, Editorial, Bau 4 (1966), 65: my translation

from German. 36 Catalogue for ‘Hollein’ exhibition at the Feigen Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, 22–28

June 1969, on the occasion of the AIA Convention. Unpaginated. 37 Catalogue for ‘Hollein’ exhibition. 38 Hans Hollein, ‘Neue Medien der Architektur: Fragmentarische Anmerkungen

zu neuen Entwicklungen und Möglichkeiten’. Originally published in Wort und Wahrheit, this article was reprinted in its entirety in Fleck, Avantgarde in Wien, 596–599, footnote 95. Fleck included Otto Mauer’s quite critical written response to this Hollein essay. See also: http://www.hollein.com/ger/Schriften/Texte/NeueMedien-Architektur [accessed 25 April 2017]. 39 McLuhan is mentioned again in the ‘Alles ist Architektur’, issue, Bau 1/2 (1968), 24. 40 ‘Alles ist Architektur’, 1. 41 Peter Weibel, ‘Zeit der Transition: Avantgarde zwischen Kunst und Massenkultur/

Time of Transition: Avant-Garde between Art and Mass Culture’, Werkstatt Aspekt 2 (1967). Cited and partially quoted in Bau 3 (1968), 50: my translation from German. 42 ‘Bildnachweis’, Bau 1/2 (1968), 1. 43 Interview by author with Hans Hollein in his office in Vienna on 4 June 2010. 44 This project was developed from 1962 to 1964 and variously called ‘Vision of a City’,

‘Communication-interchange of a city’ and ‘Valley City’. 45 The collaboration of Hans Hollein as a contributor to Archigram can be seen within

the Archigram Archival Project created at the University of Westminster.http:// archigram.westminster.ac.uk/collaboratorlist.php#342 [accessed 16 May 2015]. This shows that Hollein’s ideas and projects were included in Archigram 4, Archigram 5, and at the IDEA Folkestone Exhibition and Conference in April 1967. 46 Hans Hollein, Editorial, Bau 5 (1968), 85. 47 Interview by author with Günther Feuerstein in his office in Vienna on 27 February

2012.

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2 SERIAL POSTMODERNITY: ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION PUBLICATIONS IN THE 1980S IGOR MARJANOVIĆ

Architecture and Continuity is the first in a series of planned exhibitions and catalogues illustrating themes which have preoccupied staff and students within the Architectural Association in recent years. The intensity and the cohesiveness shown here is one characteristic of the unit system which has been the basic organizational device within the school for the past decade whereby staff and students arrange themselves in self-selecting groups respecting differences in pedagogical technique, theoretical and ideological positions and attitudes towards design and style.1 ALVIN BOYARSKY, 1982

With these words Alvin Boyarsky, then chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, introduced Architecture and Continuity, the first catalogue in a new series of publications titled ‘Themes’ and documenting student projects that came from the school’s unit system, in this case the unit run by Dalibor Veselý and Mohsen Mostafavi. This mode of teaching included a menu of studios offered to students in an open market in which the AA tutors competed

This essay is part of a larger research project that has benefited from the help of many individuals and organizations. I am grateful to Nicholas Boyarsky and Nicola Murphy for their support and friendship over many years. Thomas Weaver kindly provided image rights for materials used in this essay. Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka offered insightful advice through their editorial work on this volume. I am also thankful to Karen Jacobson for her valuable comments, as well as to Jane Neidhardt, to whom I am particularly grateful for her constructive suggestions, camaraderie, and unflagging support as this essay was taking shape.

for students through studio presentations, while the students subjected themselves to rigorous portfolio reviews in order to gain entry into desirable units.2 By 1982, Boyarsky’s eleventh year as the school chairman, the unit system had consolidated itself into a powerful source of image production – through portfolio reviews, through year-end shows, and increasingly through publications – as the AA was evolving from a British school to an international one.3 At the same time, paralleling the global resurgence of interest in architectural drawings, the school increasingly turned to exhibitions and publications as its main preoccupation. The production of publications was particularly ambitious in the second decade of Boyarsky’s tenure, with more than one hundred titles released by the time of his death in 1990. These books showcased both student projects from the AA – from the influential units led by Peter Cook, Bernard Tschumi, Veselý and Mostafavi and many others – and projects by architects such as Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind, to name just a few. To this day, they remain one of the most enduring legacies of Boyarsky’s tenure at the AA. He was in fact as much the school’s chairman as its main curator and publisher, acting as the school’s overall manager of media production, which included drawings, exhibitions, books and even TV. Yet as Hejduk described it, the fabrication of books was Boyarsky’s ‘first architectural love’, and it remained central to the AA’s entire field of media production.4 I would in fact argue that these book series were exhibitions rather than mere catalogues. Furthermore, with their carefully orchestrated serial format, they functioned more like periodicals than single archival publications. Published within specific series – Boxes, Folios, Megas, Texts, Themes, Types, and Works, as well as a number of Small Catalogues – these books were more than simple records of an institutional history; rather, they were testaments to a period in architecture history, one that was feverishly preoccupied with the search for a new disciplinary language. The seriality of AA publications, coupled with their close link to exhibitions, provides a particular window into the postmodern, which, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, should be ‘discussed as a historical condition rather than only as style’.5 By closely reading the seriality of AA books, I seek to understand them as anchors of the school’s overall media production in the 1980s but also as formal and social devices responding to this larger historical condition – a context that was defined not by a single style or approach but by inherent multiplicity and internationalism, in short by what I call serial postmodernity.

Serial themes: Design research to drawing discourse There are serial behaviour, serial feelings and serial thoughts; in other words, a series is a mode of being for individuals both in relation to one another and

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in relation to their common being and this mode of being transforms all their structures.6 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, 1976 Sartre’s timeless reflection on the series reveals its capacity to engage both individual and collective identity through a web of social relations. A series of people waiting for the bus is his most famous example; another is a web of radio listeners around the world following a broadcast. Unlike organized and homogeneous social groups, series are connected by more peculiar mechanisms – bus tickets and traffic rules, radio waves and transmitting hardware – allowing the members of a series to participate in an activity yet remain different from one another, simultaneously negotiating their collective and individual identities. The differences among its members – or alterity in Sartre’s own terms – are the hallmarks of a series.7 Building on Sartre’s concepts of series, I will examine the AA publications as both formal and social serial devices. While the AA had printed small exhibition catalogues since 1976 – ever since Boyarsky rebranded the in-house printing activities under the umbrella of AA Publications – they were not grouped into series until 1982, when the first series was launched, the Themes, showcasing the work of the AA units. While the school had employed this mode of teaching since the 1930s – a time when the school converted from a Beaux-Arts curriculum to a modernist one – Boyarsky expanded the unit system throughout the school. His appropriation of the unit system speaks of his dialectical attitude towards modernity. He accepted the legacy of some of its mechanisms yet rejected their content. For example, he accepted the structure of the modernist unit system, but he also rejected the focus on issues such as transportation, planning, and housing policies, the hallmark topics of the British modernist academy after the Second World War.8 Instead he transformed the unit system into what he called a ‘well-laid table’ of ideas and offerings.9 A rebellion against professionalization, this system was effectively a criticism of the modernist academy, which was not surprising since Boyarsky was a student of Colin Rowe, one of the most prominent critics of modernist architecture and planning at the time.10 Like his pedagogical work, Boyarsky’s publishing agenda dialectically embraced the legacy of modernism. He cannily retooled the school’s existing publication programme, which in the late 1960s included a series called the Architectural Association Papers. Featuring a consistent A4 format, these books covered various areas of design research, including building technologies and case studies in modern historiography: Roofs in the Warm Humid Tropics (1965), Design Methods in Architecture (1969), Working-Class Housing in 19th-Century Britain (1971) and so on. While reflecting the seriality of their modernist precursors, the series launched under Boyarsky differed in content, introducing a focus on the multiplicity of drawing practices. Consequently the Themes showcased a carefully curated range of units and their visual preoccupations: Veselý and Mostafavi’s Architecture and Continuity

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(1982) featured delicately rendered axonometric drawings of urban blocks; Tschumi and Nigel Coates’s Discourse of Events (1983) featured photographs and collages; Michael Gold’s People in Architecture (1983) was illustrated with colourful figure drawings; and so on. The diversity of unit offerings was sustained by their investment in drawing as a form of visual distinction – a process of differentiation that was also aided by the school’s publishing and curatorial programmes. By the late 1970s the school galleries were expanded to three spaces throughout the building, allowing for multiple exhibitions, often with opposing approaches – a curatorial strategy that Cook called an instrument of ‘the developed Boyarsky regime’.11 The school was now displaying several exhibitions at a time, responding not only to its own multiplicity but also to the increased polyvalence of the era. Consequently the early publishing and curatorial programme included historical shows such as those on Gertrude Jekyll, Hermann Muthesius and J.J.P. Oud, as well as presentations of contemporary architects associated with the AA – such as Gold, Libeskind and OMA – always with a healthy selection of shows featuring the AA units. All these shows had Small Catalogues, as they were called, that featured a consistent seven-inch square format and modest black-and-white illustrations. While the growing exhibitions programme and unit offerings successfully pushed the production of drawing within the school, the publications were lagging behind in print quality and quantity – a predicament that would be addressed through the school’s Communications Unit. The Communications Unit taught all students various modes of representation: freehand drawing, engraving, etching, silk-screen printing, video and photography. In 1971 the unit absorbed the AA Print Studio, and by 1974 it assumed the logistical operations of AA Publications. Consequently its teaching investment in diverse visual practices would extend into the varying formats of the AA books that soon followed. This was also a result of Boyarsky’s continued investment in the school’s printing equipment: by the early 1980s the Communications Unit obtained new computerized equipment capable of greater experimentation with type and layout, which enabled its leader, Dennis Crompton, to develop a greater range of book formats and typographic fonts. These advances were already evident in the Themes series, which, although only slightly bigger than Small Catalogues, had a much better image quality, featuring also a limited number of colour reproductions. But as much as the Themes showcased the variation of formal languages, they also visualized the social space of the school, exposing at the same time both the formal and social aspects of series and seriality. Each Theme, for example, demonstrated the ‘intensity and the cohesiveness’ of the unit’s visual language, marking also a social space in which ‘staff and students arrange themselves in self-selecting groups’.12 The Themes mapped this social space both explicitly and implicitly. A drawing in Architecture and Continuity was particularly telling of that: a site plan produced by a team of students shows how different apartment buildings come together to form an urban forum. Located within the site plan

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are the numbers one to six, corresponding to the names of the six participating students who came from different parts of the world, including Greece, Iran and Japan.13 This diagram recalls Sartre’s definition of series as social entities made up of diverse individuals, and it also reveals the fact that, by the early 1980s, the school included a majority of international students and faculty for a variety of pragmatic and conceptual reasons.14

Loose sheets: Reproduction to representation The Folios series, one of the most lavish of all, started with Libeskind’s Chamber Works (1983). Its format surpassed the limitations of Small Catalogues: it contained a series of twenty-eight prints packaged in a twelve-inch square box wrapped in black silk-screened covers. The prints were made up of abstract black lines on a white background, fourteen horizontal compositions and fourteen vertical compositions. The Folios’ black boxes were an appropriation of a readily available packaging material used to ship vinyl records. But once wrapped in black fabric, these boxes transformed into delicate artworks, containing loose printed sheets (the English word folio comes from the Latin folium, meaning ‘leaf ’). Unlike bound volumes, the Folios became portable exhibitions, allowing the visitors, as Boyarsky said, to hang the prints in the privacy of their own homes.15 They also enabled a non-linear reading of the work – the loose prints could be rearranged in seemingly endless variations – which, in case of Libeskind’s abstract compositions, caused the exhibition staff to be confused about how to display them in the actual exhibition.16 The Folios’ format reflects Crompton’s deep understanding of contemporary printing processes – innovations in digital printmaking techniques allowed for better reproduction of line weight, which made the plates look like artworks rather than illustrations – as well as his and Boyarsky’s fruitful collaboration with the book designer Lorraine Wild. Trained in the mid-1970s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a school inspired by the arts and crafts movement, Wild belonged to a generation of designers who sought to ‘overcome modernism’ by promoting a more diverse and individualized approach to book design responsive to the new context of the 1980s, in which, she wrote, ‘the linear is harder to detect and the simultaneous has become habitual’.17 As loose sheets responded to this non-linearity, they also offered architects an opportunity to engage in printmaking, which, by its nature, is a serial process. Libeskind produced the Chamber Works prints while at Cranbrook, one of the hotbeds of US printmaking culture, where he used the print studio to actively engage printmaking as a form of architectural drawing, using screen printing and lithography to reproduce ink drawings through a series of variations. Consequently

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FIGURE 2.1 Peter Eisenman, Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1985), Folio 5, cover and plate no. 14.

the Chamber Works screen prints – as well as their exquisite reproductions in the Folio – exhibit delicate line work that captured the precision of the original drawings yet offer a greater variation of tonal qualities.18 Unlike photocopying, these techniques allowed a sophisticated form of mechanical reproduction, foreshadowing architecture’s transition into the digital era. The variation of prints was particularly visible in Eisenman’s Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1985), Folio 5, which contained a series of embossed prints on white paper followed by colour variations on grey paper (Figure 2.1). Documenting abstract transformations of a cube through a series of iterative geometrical steps, the prints resembled Eisenman’s house designs, such as his House X. Repetition and variation were at the core of this project, recalling also Umberto Eco’s essay ‘Interpreting Serials’, in which he wrote, ‘In this period one is facing the postmodern aesthetics, which is revisiting the very concepts of repetition and iteration with a different profile’.19 Where modern art promoted innovation – absorbing the tools and rhetoric of mass production to produce revolutionary new forms – postmodern art responded with variation to infinity. Eco’s framework has inspired authors to think of serial art forms in other fields, such as Stephen Hock’s writings on repetition in American fiction or Tudor Oltean’s reflections on the common logic of seriality in TV.20 Yet in this discussion I seek to understand the book series as both a sequenced publishing format – one that indeed recalls the instalments of serial novels or TV series – and a serial form of making architecture. It is a form of architecture that is not necessarily layered with brick and mortar but is sometimes composed of elusive printed sheets, such as those contained in the Folio boxes. The Folios’ vinyl containers evoked the seriality of popular culture, such as sitcoms, films and novels. Coincidentally the AA started a project called TVAA

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in the 1970s, producing films that often featured interviews with architects and lectures presented at the school. They were broadcast through an internal closedcircuit transmission that, with its black-and-white images, offered limited visual and sound quality.21 Consequently the print projects soon eclipsed such televised media experiments, perhaps also in part because the print quality became so exquisite that it allowed architects to experiment with drawing in an unprecedented manner. Coop Himmelblau’s Folio 13, Blaubox (1988), included iterations of prints on several types of paper: freehand sketches on translucent Mylar as well as orthographic plans and sections on transparent acetate sheets, all of which were combined with photographs of models and built work. Accompanied by a full-scale construction in Bedford Square, this Folio suggested that the abstract lines inside the black box could also be built. But rather than reifying the constructability of architecture, the Folios emphasized drawing – the plates are numbered in a way that stacked Mylar and acetate drawing sheets on top of the photographs of built work and building models. This made printed drawings a ghostly lens for looking at built architecture. This layering of drawings was also complemented by the increased use of colour separations. The last Folio, Kikō Mozuna’s Kojiki of Architecture (1991), employed an astonishing twentyseven colour separations during printing to achieve a range of hues unseen in architectural publishing to date – a colourful book that defied architecture’s black-and-white stereotypes. Because these books became custom-made artefacts, they shifted the entire publication focus from reproduction to representation. As Tschumi wrote, ‘any new attitude to architecture had to question its mode of representation’ and to embrace drawing as an ‘art form in itself, with its own frame of reference, deliberately set apart from the conventions of architectural plans and sections’.22 This recalls the school’s overall faith in drawing, so poignantly captured by the architecture historian Robin Evans, who noted ‘the drawing’s distinctness from and unlikeness to the thing that is represented, rather than its likeness to it’.23 Such drawings were ‘unhooked’ from the actual objects that they were supposed to signify, allowing the image, according to Eisenman, to act as a ‘replication, representation or abstraction of an object’.24 This unhooking, or the breaking down of the relationship between an image (signifier) and an object (signified), echoes the contemporaneous repudiation of textual representation in philosophy  – a  suspicion initially seeded by Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that ‘Writing veils the appearance of language; it is not a guise but a disguise’.25 Jacques Derrida later referred to writing as a ‘strange “image” whose “representation” is not innocent’.26 He was a key theoretical proponent of visual and textual deconstruction – a process by which the links between text and meaning are severed – which promoted both difference and deferral of meaning, or to use Derrida’s own word, différance. As this line of thought gained traction in the Folios,27 the series’ inherent multiplicity both visualized the différance and marked the nascent social web of

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deconstructivist architecture globally. A form of architecture that fused the formal language of Russian constructivism with Derrida’s post-structuralist theories of indefinite play of signs and meaning, deconstructivism was deeply linked to the AA. As the architecture historian Mary McLeod observed, the loose group of architects associated with deconstructivism ‘has been explicitly international from the beginning, with the Architectural Association in London and the former Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, both international exchange centers, being the largest common bonds’.28 Another bond was the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and its exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture in 1988. All seven architects featured in the show had strong ties to the AA, and five of them had been featured in the Folios: Eisenman, Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, Libeskind and Tschumi (the other two, Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, also had exhibitions at the AA).29 This sanctioning by a MoMA show testifies to effectiveness of the AA’s media strategies. The Folios were an important aspect of that promotion, and so were the repeated features on the AA exhibitions and catalogues in the school’s new journal, AA Files, which started in 1981 and often included extended reviews and cover illustrations. But, I will argue, it was also the seriality of the books that made them so effective in building an international audience. While book distribution was often clumsy and ad hoc – when visiting schools of architecture, Boyarsky and Crompton would travel with a suitcase full of AA books to sell (or give away) – the book series compensated for that by creating a sense of scarcity through their limited print runs and a sense of anticipation through their serial format. As each publication became more precious and surprising than the last, it built anticipation among the AA’s international audiences – including among prospective students around the world, who were essential to the school’s long-term financial stability. This was perhaps a canny lesson from mass media: as Oltean wrote, ‘the purpose of the serial transformation is to bind the audience to a narrative sequential process, maintaining its involvement as a receiver of successive episodes, and attempting to seduce it as a co-author of the whole’.30 Indeed, ‘Alvin always surprised us by his next publication’, Hejduk recalled. ‘He kept us in anticipation and he kept us off centre’.31 This anticipation was carefully orchestrated through constantly changing book formats. Two years into the production of the Folios, the AA launched an offshoot, the Box series, which shared the same basic format but featured thicker, deeper boxes. They also started to contain a variety of objects: Daniel Weil’s Box 1, Light Box (1985), contained drawings printed on cloth and metal sheets. Kisa Kawakami’s Box 2, Plus Minus Box (1985), was even heavier: it held prints but also thick foam-core reliefs inspired by abstract origami patterns. Perhaps the most elaborate was Eisenman’s Box 3, Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors (1986), which comprised silk-screen prints on acetate in a heavy acrylic box (Figure 2.2). Screen printing relies on the use of acetate to transfer artwork onto plates, and consequently it could have been

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FIGURE 2.2 Peter Eisenman, Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors (1986), Box 3, acrylic box and stacked prints.

an inspiration for using these transparent sheets as the final book product. This transparency allowed for all sheets to be seen simultaneously when stacked or to be viewed separately, based on a reader’s preference, enabling the reader to act as co-author. This was the ultimate dissolution of linear reading and meaning. As these boxes became small collections of objects, they echoed Boyarsky’s own collecting impulse.32 With their boxed objecthood, they allowed architects to experiment with visual production with the freedom of an artist. They responded well to the cultural mandate of the era to move things ‘off-centre’, enabling architects to engage new formats and references, constantly expanding their field of production, all in the thrilling context of a series’ new instalment.

Sewn books: The visual to the tactile The books grew larger and larger. The largest of them, the Mega series, featured an eclectic mix of contemporary artists and architects – including Julia Bolles and Peter Wilson, Eva Jiřičná, Christopher Macdonald, Mary Miss, Peter Salter, Michael Webb and Lebbeus Woods – as well as another strand of titles focused on case studies in twentieth-century architecture, including the work of Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz and Dimitris Pikionis. Perhaps the most diverse of all, the Megas were indicative of the AA’s contribution to the larger postmodern debate  – rather than a singular orbit, they created a spectrum of topics that constantly oscillated between the historical and the contemporary. Mega 1 was Libeskind’s Theatrum Mundi (1985), which, in contrast to the zigzagging lines of Chamber Works, included painterly compositions with varied

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FIGURE 2.3 Daniel Libeskind’s Theatrum Mundi (1985), Mega 1, Mary Miss’s Projects 1966–1987 (1987), Mega 7, and Gunnar Asplund 1885–1940: The Dilemma of Classicism (1988), Mega 9, dust jackets.

gestural marks (Figure 2.3). The book, designed by Wild, had a unique format: it opened as a large accordion of prints. When folded, the accordion was held in place by soft and textured covers, which offered pleasant friction to the fingertips. There were no images on the cover, just the title – an enigmatic reference to the world at large. Heavily invested in drawing, the entire series featured delicate dust jackets, for most part screen-printed, such as the austere black-and-white lines of Michael Webb’s Mega 5, Temple Island (1987), or Mega 9, on Asplund, which featured a deep-blue dust jacket with a subtle embossing of Stockholm’s Royal Chancellery site plan. By the time Mega 10, on Lewerentz, appeared, the covers had been taken to an entirely new level: its dust jacket was made of construction sandpaper with a printed close-up of the architect’s church of St Mark in Björkhagen. Boyarsky and Crompton chose this cover so that the book would embody the physical qualities of Lewerentz’s built work. After many visits to various construction supply stores in London, they settled on a particular type of sandpaper – incidentally called the English Abrasives – that had just the right coarseness and tar smell.33 When the book was placed on or removed from a shelf, its sandpaper cover would slowly erase those of adjacent books as well as its own printed image, echoing both the temporality of books and the weathering of buildings. The book’s bespoke cover now appeared delicately handmade; its extreme customization was possible in the AA’s educational context, which promoted books as artistic projects rather than commodities made for profit. This approach was at times hampered by the AA’s internal controversies, with the AA Council, its governing body, often threatening to terminate Boyarsky’s contract in part because of the high publications overhead.34 Yet Boyarsky and Crompton continued to pursue their customization, boldly defying the standardization of commercial book production. Wild wrote, ‘Unfamiliar forms of work produced in response to

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major changes in technology are often classified as “ugly” because of their formal strangeness, and interpreted as evidence of aesthetic malfeasance, the obliteration of standards and practices of craft. Consequently, the “subject of the technology is dematerialized” and made “infinitely variable”’.35 Initially seduced by the advances in technology, the AA now sought to overcome them. This obliteration of technology is evident in the books’ increased physicality and rough texture – a process that built on the boxed objecthood of the previous series and that, paradoxically, countered one of the main strands of postmodernity, that of glossiness. In his seminal essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Fredric Jameson reflected on Andy Warhol’s painting Diamond Dust Shoes and its ‘new kind of flatness or depthlessness’, as well as the glossy sheen of ‘the great reflective glass skin of the Bonaventura (Hotel)’ in John Portman’s corporate architecture.36 Yet in another of his essays, ‘Historicism in The Shining’, he timidly posed a question about the potential for certain cinematic art forms to escape the prevailing ‘cult of the glossy image’ and to engage roughness and texture instead, expressing longing ‘for something both more ugly and less proficient or expert, more home-made and awkward’.37 This pursued roughness was in fact present in these AA publications, which were experiments both with rough textures but also with ‘rough’ texts, including with difficult historical topics. This process culminated toward the end of the 1980s as the AA books appeared ever more unique – or ‘awkward’ even – boldly embracing Wild’s ‘formal strangeness’ and an affinity for another, ‘rougher’ kind of postmodernity. Hejduk’s Victims (1986), a book that inaugurated the Text series, was a sign of that turn. The book grasped a difficult historical subject, engaging a ‘rough’ rather than stylistic side of history: it was a reflection on the Nazi atrocities at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. This narrative was indicative of the ways in which the AA overall engaged history, often defying the prevailing historicist architecture of the time.38 The book allowed Hejduk to practise architecture as a draftsman, as well as an author, a poet. It also fused text with texture, extending its thematic ‘roughness’ into its haptic domain: the pages were made of folded sheets with pockets in between; it was thick yet very soft to the touch. Resembling a sketchbook, it was stitched rather than bound, directly inspired by a hand-sewn Japanese notebook that Wild sent to Boyarsky and Crompton. Ultimately they wanted the same feel for Victims, musing on its ‘flop factor’ – a capacity to fold on itself when held at the spine.39 This tactile approach was carried further. Text 2, Hejduk’s The Collapse of Time (1986), echoed the minimal aesthetic of Victims with a simple grey cover consisting of text only. This repetition is emblematic of the series, yet so are the seemingly infinite variations. Unlike Victims, The Collapse of Time was hardbound – one of the very few hardbound books in the entire production – giving it a particular weight. This physicality also extended into the exhibition, which, in addition to drawings, included an installation: with the help of the AA students, Hejduk built

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The Collapse of Time in the form of a tall wooden clock in front of the AA. This book, too, looked like a hardbound sketchbook – a quality that resurfaced yet again in Text 4, Howard Robertson and F.R. Yerbury’s Travels in Modern Architecture 1925–1930 (1989) and Tschumi’s Text 5, Questions of Space (1990). These books had soft black covers and were inspired by small sketchbooks, which, by their nature, are tactile artefacts linked to handwriting and hand drawing.40 This sketchbook quality also marked Text 6, Nostalgia of Culture: Contemporary Soviet Visionary Architecture (1988), which featured the works of contemporary Russian ‘paper architects’, most notably Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. Trained as architects, they refused to join big Soviet offices and instead immersed themselves in drawing, printmaking and book production. Appearing in the waning days of the Cold War, Nostalgia of Culture reaffirmed the AA’s role as one of the key progenitors of not only the historical Russian avant-garde in the West – through Koolhaas’s and Hadid’s reappropriation of 1920s constructivism – but also of the work of contemporary Russian architects who refused to subordinate themselves to the rigid professional structure under communism. This exposed a multicultural parallel: as much as the architects in the West were trapped by the market economy, the architects in the East were confronted with a stultifying political climate. When recalling the history of this catalogue, Nicholas Boyarsky noted that his father ‘wanted to have the feel of a self-published samizdat text that would be passed among dissident friends at great personal risk’.41 Indeed the book had a handmade, informal feel to it: its pages were soft yet had some coarseness to them. The book was also an emblem of international relationships – of architects, book designers and printmakers ‘stitched’ together in between the East and the West. The social space of the series was an international alliance that resisted historicism and professionalization – a struggle also captured in Boyarsky’s famous utterance ‘we fight the battle with the drawings on the wall’. He continued, ‘We’re in pursuit of architecture, we discuss it boldly, we draw it as well as we can and we exhibit it’.42 The seemingly infinite formats of AA publications signalled that this fight was rooted in architecture’s endless multiplicity. It was linked neither to utilitarian built work nor to its illustration; rather, as universality diffused into multiculturalism, seriality became a form of architecture in its own right.

Serial postmodernity: Universal to multicultural What presents itself to perception either as a sort of organized totality (men huddled together, waiting) or as a dispersal, possesses, as a collecting together of

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men by the object, a completely different basic structure which, by means of serial ordering, transcends the conflict between exterior and interior, between unity and identity.43 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, 1976 The serial postmodernity of AA books acted as a loose playground in which multiple differences were enacted: the historical and the contemporary; the theoretical and the visual; the economy and the poetics of architectural production. Each series was a loose social group of diverse individuals, put into a dialogue through the works of editors and readers. These series were collections that did not need a fixed sense of community: like the people huddled together waiting for a bus, brought together by their tickets, these architects entered the series by virtue of their book projects, only to depart them once a different player has been engaged for the next project. This sustained difference mirrors Sartre’s notion of otherness, for ‘the formal, universal structure of alterity produces the formula of the series’.44 The AA book series engendered this alterity through their representational differences, recalling the period’s overall quest for varying approaches and also the differences played out in the AA’s galleries and review rooms on a daily basis. These multiplicities both built on and defied their modernist precursors. Oddly enough, ‘serial postmodernity’ used modernist tools of mass production, repetition and formal innovation, yet these strategies were retooled, sequenced and varied, enabling it to criticize the preceding era with its own set of methodologies. These characteristics also allowed it to take a similarly dialectical approach to postmodernism (suggesting probably the wider predicament of the modern-postmodern categorization). For theorists like Jameson, these differences were essentially seen in economic terms: ‘every position in postmodernism in culture … is also at one and at the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today’.45 Jameson’s economic unpacking of postmodernism culminates with ‘a waning of affect’, whereby works of art lose their depth, narrative and expression, with their surfaces becoming meaning itself and their subjects ‘commodified and transformed into their own images’.46 Jean-François Lyotard, in contrast, posited theories based on more formal interests in the postmodern condition – a phrase that he coined in 197947 – exploring how philosophy can intersect with curatorship and manifest itself through new aesthetics of the information society.48 For Lyotard, the prevalent ‘crisis of legitimation’ – the loss of all emancipatory and speculative metanarratives – gave birth to performativity, efficiency, profitability and communicability of both art and knowledge.49 Serial postmodernity straddles these two viewpoints, fusing together economy with aesthetic innovation. As these books became loose Sartrian series, they flattened buildings into images, embracing the revolutionary zeal of an era  – namely its repudiation of all conventions of representation – with the global

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image market. While the goal of the publications was not profit from sales, their economic value was notable nonetheless. They were successful in recruiting new students and faculty to the AA and eventually propelling their protagonists into major teaching posts, museum exhibitions and, ultimately, built work.50 More importantly, they were successful in their ability to embrace complexity, engaging the visual, the textual and the tactile all at once. Experimental, fragmented and multiplied, these exquisitely produced books are a testament to plurality and to an institutional investment in making, drawing and writing. Such a commitment is perhaps harder to find in today’s task-orientated designs – whether sustainable, digital or otherwise – which often fail to recover the multilayered complexity of architecture. As the book series pushed the architects to assume multiple roles – and thus bodies of life and work – they also revealed some of the lasting legacies of serial postmodernity. Engendering complexity through seriality, the AA books supplanted economic globalization with an internationalism of a new kind. They traced new social, cultural and economic webs: series of architects practising as teachers, writers, artists and bookmakers. As these books allowed architects to assume multiple identities, they were naturally conducive to global dialogues and differences. These multiplicities contrasted with the modernist notion of a licensed architect-practitioner – often confined to a single nation or type of practice by virtue of his or her registration – encouraging instead a spectrum of cultural production that crossed boundaries of profession, time and geography. This multiplicity related to individuals and to wider disciplinary roles – architecture as art, publication as idea and object – empowering serial postmodernity not only to build architecture but also to build cultural complexity.

Notes 1

Alvin Boyarsky, foreword to Architecture and Continuity: Kentish Town Projects, 1978–1981; Diploma Unit 1, by Dalibor Veselý and Mohsen Mostafavi (London: Architectural Association, 1982), 3.

2

On the quasi-economic model of the unit system and its link to exhibitions and publications, see Igor Marjanović, ‘Drawing Ambience’, in Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, by Igor Marjanović and Jan Howard (St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University; Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2014), 22–57. On the introduction of the unit system, see John Summerson, Architectural Association, 1847–1947 (London: Pleiades, 1947), 47, and Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), esp. 183. On the unit system under Boyarsky, see Andrew Higgott, ‘Searching for the Subject: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association’, in Mediating Modernism: Architectural

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Cultures in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006), 154–177; my essays ‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Delicatessen’, in Jane Rendell et al., eds, Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007), 190–199, and ‘Lines and Words on Display: Alvin Boyarsky as a Collector, Curator, and Publisher’, Architectural Research Quarterly 14 (Fall 2010), 165–174; and Irene Sunwoo, ‘From the “Well-Laid Table” to the “Market Place”: The Architectural Association Unit System’, Journal of Architectural Education 65 (March 2012), 24–41. 3

As the only independent school of architecture in Britain, the AA was deprived of government student loans, which turned British students away from it and instead pushed the school towards an international student market.

4

John Hejduk, ‘A Sense of Spirit: Alvin Boyarsky 1928–1990’, AA Files 20 (Autumn 1990), 4.

5

Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, in ‘Modernity and Postmodernity’, special issue, New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984), 9.

6

Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), 266.

7

Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 256–267.

8

On the modernist academy in the United Kingdom, see Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock, Architecture: Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994).

9

Alvin Boyarsky, ‘In Progress IV: Summer Session 1970’, Architectural Design 41 (April 1971), 220.

10 Prompted by Rowe, Boyarsky wrote a masters dissertation on Camillo Sitte at Cornell

University in the 1950s. For more on Boyarsky and Rowe, see Igor Marjanović, ‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Chicago: An Architectural Critic in the City of Strangers’, AA Files 60 (2010), 45–52. 11 Peter Cook, ‘Larger than Life’, AA Files 3 (January 1983), 78. 12 Boyarsky, foreword to Veselý and Mostafavi, Architecture and Continuity, 3. 13 Apartment house types were drawn by students Thommy Kjelstrop Johnston; Fumio

Schimizou from Japan (also spelled Shimizu elsewhere); Demetris Anifadakis, Vasos Veneris and Athanasios Spanomoaridis (who also taught at the AA from 1980 to 1982) from Greece; and Kaveh Mehrabani from Iran. Veselý and Mostafavi, Architecture and Continuity, 32. 14 On the rise of AA’s internationalism, see Marjanović, ‘Drawing Ambience’. 15 Alvin Boyarsky, foreword to Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes

from Heraclitus, by Daniel Libeskind, Folio 1 (London: Architectural Association, 1983), unpaged. 16 Apparently they were exhibited in the wrong order in the Chamber Works show.

Robin Evans, ‘In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind’, AA Files 6 (1983), 92. 17 Lorraine Wild, ‘On Overcoming Modernism’, in Michael Bierut et al., eds, Looking

Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth, 1994), 56. 18 Igor Marjanović et al., ‘Daniel Libeskind’, in Marjanović and Howard, Drawing

Ambience, 86–91.

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19 Umberto Eco, ‘Interpreting Serials’, in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1991), 84. 20 See Stephen Hock, ‘“Stories Told Sideways Out of the Big Mouth”: John Dos Passos’s

Bazinian Camera Eye’, Literature/Film Quarterly 33, 1 (2005), 20–27, and Tudor Oltean, ‘Series and Seriality in Media Culture’, European Journal of Communication 8, 1 (1993), 5–31. See also Tim Dant, Television and the Moral Imaginary: Society through the Small Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 21 On the history of TVAA, see Henderson Downing, ‘Between Tradition and Oblivion:

Notes on Art Net and the AA Film Archive’, ‘Transcription of Cedric Price’s Lecture, “Even Old Moore’s Offers Less,”’ and ‘Architectural Magazines: Transcript of a TVAA Recording’, AA Files 55 (Summer 2007), 38–61; and Irene Sunwoo, ‘The Static Age’, AA Files 62 (Winter 2010), 110–129. 22 Bernard Tschumi, ‘Space and Events’, in The Discourse of Events, Themes 3 (London:

Architectural Association, 1983), 8, 11: Tschumi’s emphasis. 23 Robin Evans, ‘Translation from Drawing to Building’, in Translation from Drawing to

Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 154. 24 Peter Eisenman, ‘Representations of the Limit: Writing a “Not-Architecture,”’ in

Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus, Folio 1 (London: Architectural Association, 1983), 7. 25 Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1966), 30. Also cited in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 35. 26 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 35. 27 Derrida was heavily referenced in Eisenman’s Fin d’Ou T Hou S; see also Jacques

Derrida, ‘Point de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture’, in La Case Vide: La Villette, 1985, by Bernard Tschumi, Folio 8 (London: Architectural Association, 1986), 4–19. 28 Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to

Deconstructivism’, Assemblage 8 (February 1989), 44. 29 Philip Johnson, the exhibition curator, credited Boyarsky as ‘the key patron of most

of the seven architects in their formative years’. Philip Johnson, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 9. 30 Oltean, ‘Series and Seriality in Media Culture’, 11. 31 Hejduk, ‘A Sense of Spirit’, 4. 32 On Boyarsky as a collector, see my essays ‘Lines and Words on Display’ and ‘Alvin

Boyarsky’s Chicago’, 45–52. See also my essay ‘Drawing Ambience’. 33 Dennis Crompton, ‘Evolutionary Publication’, lecture at Washington University in St.

Louis, 17 September 2014. 34 In a memo to Boyarsky, the AA Council requested that ‘all expenditures on both

research and production on new publications must cease by 31 July 1990 at the latest’. AA Finance Group, meeting minutes, 30 May 1990, FIN GP 89/90:36, clause 5.1, Alvin Boyarsky Archive, London. 35 Wild, ‘On Overcoming Modernism’, 56.

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36 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left

Review 1 (July–August 1984), 60, 82. 37 Fredric Jameson, ‘Historicism in The Shining’, in Signatures of the Visible (London:

Routledge, 1992), 85. 38 The school’s units, too, resisted historical pastiche, with the noted exception of Léon

Krier’s unit. 39 Crompton, ‘Evolutionary Publication’. 40 One of Boyarsky’s diaries was a sketchbook that was also a model for the Texts. Alvin

Boyarsky Archive, London. 41 Nicholas Boyarsky, ‘“We Fight the Battle with the Drawings on the Wall”’, in

Marjanović and Howard, Drawing Ambience, 141. 42 Alvin Boyarsky, ‘Ambience and Alchemy’, Architectural Review 1040 (October 1983),

28. 43 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 265. 44 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 264. 45 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, 55. 46 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, 61. 47 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les

éditions de Minuit, 1979). The book was published in English as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 48 Lyotard curated the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou that

explored the diversity of emergent art forms and media. See Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann, eds, 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015). 49 On the crisis of legitimation, see Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 37–67. 50 On both the conceptual and quasi-economic underpinnings of the AA’s educational,

publishing and teaching complex, see Marjanović, ‘Drawing Ambience’.

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3 ‘I DECLINE TO BE A MISSIONARY’: LATEMODERN MIRRORS AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE MICHAEL KUBO

‘There are three expectations for the Museum – and not just this museum, but most Museums – which this exhibition refuses to gratify.’ With this response to critics of Transformations in Modern Architecture, the exhibition of recent architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from February to April of 1979, Arthur Drexler let it be known that his agenda for the exhibition had been premised on a strategy of disavowal. The venue was an interview in the architecture journal Skyline in the summer of that year in which Drexler was asked ‘to discuss various criticisms leveled against [the] controversial exhibition’.1 Judging from the questions put forward by editor Andrew MacNair, the points of controversy included the exhibition’s overload of architectural images, its orientation to laymen rather than architects, the show’s almost exclusive reliance on black-and-white photographs of building exteriors, its emphasis on visual appearance rather than the architectural description of the buildings chosen, and the opacity or lack of criteria by which projects had been selected and juxtaposed. (Figure 3.1)

I would like to thank the editors of this volume as well as Caroline Jones, Kristel Smentek and Ana Miljački for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

FIGURE 3.1 Installation view of the exhibition, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture,’ February 21, 1979 through April 24, 1979. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelatinsilver print, 6 x 9” (15.2 x 22.9 cm). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo: Mali Olatunji. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Rebutting these criticisms one by one, Drexler explained precisely which expectations the exhibition refused to fulfil. ‘The first,’ he wrote, ‘is that father or mother will tell you what to do: the missionary role. I decline to be a missionary.’ He continued: Some criticism of the show has complained that the Museum has failed to give us guidance as to what we should all do next. I not only decline to do this, I think anyone pretending to do so is undertaking something quite reprehensible. ‘The second expectation’, he explained, is that the museum will validate great achievement … that the museum will winnow through all this stuff and proclaim X, Y, and Z as the heroes of American architecture. Under certain circumstances, this role is perfectly all right, but there are times when it is irrelevant – not simply irrelevant, but actually quite misleading. ‘The third role that museums play’, according to Drexler, was that of reappraisal, an especially challenging task in relation to the immediate past:

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We are in fact far enough from the twenties to be able to look at it with slightly different eyes and to have a slightly different sense of it. We no longer believe what the twenties said about the twenties, or what the thirties said about the twenties; so we re-evaluate it … Going back two years is difficult; it’s not reevaluation. Against any possibility of ascribing these typically active functions – advocacy, valuation, judgement – to the curatorial agenda behind Transformations, Drexler opted instead for the distancing curatorial tactics of multiplication, repetition and flattening. The aggressiveness of this curatorial response carried a particular urgency given the year of the exhibition, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s founding in 1929. In an article considering MoMA’s cultural legacy in the New York Times Magazine in November of that year, art critic Hilton Kramer posed a question that could equally have been applied to Transformations: ‘What is the Modern’s function in a postmodern era?’2 If this anniversary suggested the occasion for a major retrospective of the state of architectural production over the previous two decades, it was understood that such an exhibition could no longer simply extend the lineage of periodic surveys through which the museum had allied itself to the progress of the pre-war architectural avant-garde, a sequence that began with the momentous Modern Architecture: International Exhibition of 1932 and continued through the long curatorial tenures of Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson, Drexler’s predecessor as director of the Department of Architecture and Design.3 A review of architecture at the close of the 1970s would necessarily have to address the crisis of architecture’s proliferating aesthetic codes and their reception under the changing cultural conditions of late capitalism, chief among which were the myriad stylistic strains of Late Modernism and Postmodernism evident by 1979. Such a survey would act implicitly as a re-evaluation of the broader legacy of modernism and its relevance for contemporary architecture, a legacy with which the museum and its exhibitions had long been identified. The museum’s problematic relation to this architectural and artistic inheritance was thus understood by critics like Kramer to be a crisis of the institution itself. ‘The irony attending MoMA’s 50th anniversary,’ he noted, ‘comes in the form of a widely held suspicion that the work of this noble institution may now have been completed; that success has, in effect, rendered modernism, and therefore MoMA, obsolete.’4 Transformations was produced at the intersection of these two crises concerning the impacts of postmodernism: one institutional, the other disciplinary. In what follows I explore the curatorial approach of the exhibition in the face of these concerns and how it was experienced by visitors and critics caught between these opposed imperatives – the expectation for evaluation on the part of the institution that might help the viewer make sense of the fragmentation and eclecticism

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that pervaded the contemporary architectural scene, versus the curator’s stated determination to deny and even confound those expectations. These opposed stakes raised the question of how to define postmodernism as such: as a stylistic mode or set of codes – an architectural Postmodernism – or as a deeper cultural condition, one that might be reflected in the experience of the exhibition itself beyond its subject matter?5 A further question in this regard was the definition of modernism itself, and whether postmodernism should thus be understood as either a radical break from or continuation of the modernist project. Drexler pointed to these concerns in the exhibition catalogue, alluding to the rise of historicism among other recent stylistic modes and the increasing ‘conviction that the Modern Movement has entered a qualitatively different phase – different from other recent manifestations that have been called “postmodern”’.6 He proceeded to relate postmodernism directly to ‘the confusions of mass society’, quoting cultural theorist Irving Howe’s speculation on ‘the possibility that we are now living through the unsettling moral and intellectual consequences of the breakup of modernist culture, or the decline of the new’.7 In playing out these uneasy questions, Drexler invoked opposed positions as to whether postmodernism should be seen as a radical break from the modern movement at all or as fundamentally continuous with it – and whether such a development should be considered positive or negative. In this regard, the curatorial dilemma of Transformations implicitly anticipated the schema introduced a few years later by Fredric Jameson to categorize theories of the postmodern against these two axes.8 While Drexler’s own location within this schema is harder to discern, his stated intent in the exhibition to reveal the proliferation and reduction of modernist tropes ‘in the light of what happens to them when they are broadly applied’9 suggests his sympathy with the view that postmodernism was ultimately an extension of the modern movement, and that this contemporary cultural condition might be better reflected in the fragmentary and overloaded form of the exhibition itself than through attempting a stylistic definition of Postmodernism. In the second half of this essay I explore the notion that Drexler’s refusal to validate the qualities of the work on display ultimately served to reveal more fundamental shifts in the nature of architecture, beyond surface changes in style or aesthetics. In radically multiplying the quantity of buildings on display while flattening their representation to a deadpan visual register, the curatorial strategy of Transformations, I argue, unmasked the deeper hierarchies – economic rather than aesthetic – that increasingly governed contemporary building practice. Paramount among these underlying conditions was the dominant role of large-scale, corporate firms over the spectrum of architectural production in the United States by the 1970s, the producers par excellence of an endlessly pliable range of styles within an increasingly fragmented and competitive marketplace for architectural services. Drexler encapsulated the consequences of this shift in the economy of architectural practice succinctly a few years later in the introduction to Three Skyscrapers, a MoMA exhibition on recent

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buildings by three of the large firms that had featured prominently in Transformations: ‘In a free society capitalism gives us what we want, including our own demise.’10 In rejecting the museum’s traditional role in promoting this aesthetic economy, Drexler’s curatorial attitude ultimately pointed the way to later critiques of mainstream architecture, both modern and Postmodern, for its perceived complicity with the economic imperatives of late capitalism. While the problems of evaluating such corporate products and their relationship to the precedents of early twentieth-century modernism were explicitly laid bare in Transformations through an emphasis on the proliferation and repetition of deliberately generic examples, I argue that the revelatory effects of this intensification went largely unnoticed by the majority of the exhibition’s critics. Both the expert eclecticism of contemporary architecture and its ultimate banality found their reflection in a curatorial approach that emphasized both the fragmentation of ever-more differentiated stylistic tropes and, paradoxically, the repetition and formal indistinguishability of buildings produced within any specific formal category. While the few accounts of Transformations written in the three decades since its closing have sought to relate the exhibition to architecture’s ‘semantic turn’, here I wish to emphasize Drexler’s concern less with the problems of signification as such than with the underlying conditions of mainstream architectural production and their continuity across the superficial differences between modernism and postmodernism.11 In this sense, the curatorial approach of Transformations shared more in common with Fredric Jameson’s cultural analysis of postmodernism than it did with Charles Jencks’s stylistic and semiotic definition of the term. Indeed, the majority of the work on display bore a stronger affinity in form and content to the cultural category of ‘late modernism’, the parallel term introduced by Jencks to distinguish the exaggerated mode of contemporary modernism from its more self-consciously postmodern counterparts. In contrast to the ‘double-coding’ he ascribed as a defining characteristic of postmodernism, Jencks wrote that ‘LateModern architecture, “singly-coded,” takes the ideas and forms of the Modern movement to an extreme, exaggerating the structure and technological image in its attempt to provide amusement, or aesthetic pleasure.’12 While the exhibition included a number of the buildings that had been classified by Jencks as stylistically Postmodern, both the bulk of the architecture on display and Drexler’s curatorial approach relied on just such an over-exaggeration and repetition of elements in order to produce their delirious effects. There is a heavy and conspicuous overlap between the buildings included in Transformations and those included in Jencks’s ‘pictorial essay’ of late-modern exemplars.13 Chief among these were the same projects that were given visual pride of place in the exhibition: the shimmering, liquid glass curtain walls of what Jencks classified as ‘slick skin’ or ‘wet-look’ architecture. For Jameson, it was precisely this category of buildings, with their immersive interiors and hermetically enclosed exteriors, that offered the most powerful illustration of ‘the formal overtones

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proper to a late finance capitalism’.14 He famously identified this condition with the ‘postmodern hyperspace’ of John Portman & Associates’ Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, a project that also featured prominently in Transformations in the section on glass-skin buildings.15 In their bewildering array, the multitude of aesthetic transformations on display at MoMA offered a powerful confirmation of Jameson’s thesis that ‘modernism to the second power no longer looks like modernism at all, but some other space altogether’.16

The crisis of classification The hundreds of projects that appeared in Transformations were organized according to unabashedly aesthetic criteria.17 A collection of some 406 images of buildings produced internationally over the previous two decades encompassed a promiscuous array of styles, offering ample evidence of what Drexler described, quoting Peter Collins, as the ‘archaeologically unclassifiable’ nature of contemporary architectural production.18 Buildings were represented exclusively through photographs, almost entirely of exteriors, with no drawings on display – a marked contrast from exhibitions that highlighted the re-emergence of complex drawing practices and other forms of disciplinary representation within contemporary architecture discourse.19 The majority of these photographs were arrayed in long, horizontally faceted surfaces that covered the gallery walls, a visual wallpaper that bombarded the visitor, filling the visual field of the viewer with a haze of repetitive black-and-white images. The one exception to this accumulation of images was an enclosed, darkened room at the centre of the exhibition space with backlit colour transparencies of glass-skinned buildings, many chosen to highlight the luminous reflections given off by their hermetic, mirrored surfaces. (Figure 3.2) In the introduction to the catalogue for Transformations, Drexler explained that the extreme number of projects reflected an emphasis on the postmodern conditions of repetition, reproducibility and loss of meaning of architectural concepts. Surveying the products of the previous two decades of global practice, the exhibition was intended to ‘reexamine the ideas that have been held superior in the light of what happens to them when they are broadly applied’.20 In contrast to a show aimed at a selection of exemplary works for a disciplinary audience, an exhibition addressed to the general public required something both more comprehensive and less monumental, with ‘not 10 or 50 but 400 or even 4,000 buildings that illuminate the exchange of architectural ideas through their primary statement, their adaptation to normative use, their hold on our sensibilities, and their rapid devaluation’.21 The result, Drexler insisted in responding to his critics, would be a radical act of reportage, providing nothing more or less than

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FIGURE 3.2 Installation view of the exhibition, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture,’ February 21, 1979 through April 24, 1979. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelatinsilver print, 6 x 9” (15.2 x 22.9 cm). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (IN1250.3) Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

‘an analogue of the real world: bewildering, profuse, overloaded, contradictory, inconsistent, largely mediocre’.22 The exhibition was divided into four sections: sculptural form (grouping the formal genres of Brutalism, Expressionism, and ‘organic’ design), structure (organized into categories including cages, cantilevers, ‘design by system’ and glass skins), vernacular architecture (with ambiguous classifications such as ‘instant village’ and ‘details and décor’) and an eclectic category of fragmentary ‘elements’ including windows, colonnades, parapets, roofs and detachable parts. In the catalogue these categories were supplemented by a smaller selection of ‘hybrids’ and anomalous sections devoted to three individual architects – Louis Kahn, James Stirling and Robert Venturi – without explanation of why these architects were singled out among others. The extreme contingency of this classification, sometimes applied to complete buildings and at other times to details, suggests an inability to find any clear taxonomy for grouping projects together, whether visual, formal or material. What the exhibition made evident, in other words, was nothing less than the formal and stylistic eclecticism of contemporary production – ‘bewildering, profuse … largely mediocre’ – at the tail end of the succession of post-war styles

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from debates on monumentality and authenticity through the various ‘-isms’ of contemporary discourse. These ranged from the laconic glass-and-steel aesthetics of High Modernism to the expressive formal languages of Brutalism, contextualism, vernacularism and the self-conscious varieties of what had by then been termed as Postmodernism, a proliferation ably captured by Charles Jencks’s famous evolutionary tree and its own evolutions after the 1960s.23 Many of these stylistic categories reappeared in the various sections of Transformations, just as they were evident in (and had often been codified by) the lineage of architecture exhibitions and publications at MoMA in the decades after the Second World War. In this sense, what the exhibition catalogued in part was the museum’s formative role in the development of both Late Modernism and Postmodernism among other formal varieties of architectural production, serving to collect the fruits of its own discursive imprint in the form of a fifteen-year survey of the field. If this compilation was intended to raise questions about the broader legacy of modernism and its after-effects circa 1979, its content also functioned implicitly as a summary of Drexler’s previous statements on contemporary architecture through exhibitions and publications at the museum over the previous two decades. Specific groupings of works amounted to a de facto restaging of the content of earlier exhibitions and publications by Drexler during his tenure as Director of the Department of Architecture and Design, which began in 1956. This restaging appeared most conspicuously in the section titled ‘Sculptural Form: Planes and Volumes’, which consisted entirely of works by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier – four-fifths of the group that had been identified in Five Architects (1972), published as the outgrowth of a meeting of CASE (Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment) held at the museum in 1969.24 Other selections in Transformations closely mirrored Drexler’s curatorial choices in previous exhibitions. Works in Progress: Architecture by Johnson, Roche, Rudolph (1971) already grouped together three of the seven firms (out of over 200 total) with more than five projects later featured in Transformations.25 Of the three architects that were given individual sections in the catalogue – anomalies in an otherwise purely aesthetic classification – two had been the subject of individual shows at MoMA in the previous decade, James Stirling in 1968 and Louis Kahn in 1974.26 The third, Robert Venturi, had been established as a major figure by MoMA’s publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, a foundational text in the emerging discourse of Postmodernism and the first in a projected series of ‘Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture’.27 Despite the presence of these three minor sections devoted to individual architects, the majority of the projects newly compiled in Transformations were now organized not as coherent bodies of work classified according to their producers, but merely as cases of more general formal tendencies. ‘I wasn’t selecting architects, I was selecting illustrations’, Drexler had remarked.28 Furthermore, he

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relished the ways in which the broader formal affinities revealed by this density and juxtaposition undermined the architect’s insistence on the aura of singular authorship, revealing instead the generic nature of much supposedly original architectural work. ‘It’s rather like an intelligence test’, he suggested: ‘What do these pictures have in common?’ And that question infuriates architects. ‘My work has nothing in common with Joe’s and Jim’s. Obviously unique, I have invented this all by myself.’ This, however, does not appear to be the case. Certain themes have developed over a twenty-year period, which is not to say that someone has copied from someone else. It means simply that an idea is in the air, people discuss it, and it is regarded as more or less common property. It’s only when the building is finished, and someone thinks of himself as a candidate for an Oscar, that architects get nervous.29 As a mirror of the reality of architectural production – however banal – rather of than authorial intent, Drexler predicted that the inevitable result of this accumulation would be nothing less than ‘the devaluation of once lofty and supposedly profound ideas’.30 In particular, it would ‘let the hot air out of allegedly stupendous developments which seem more bombastic than stupendous. That too is very disturbing to architects and to the champions of individual factions’.31 Ada Louise Huxtable was among the few critics to recognize the potential of this devaluation to reveal the real imperatives that underlay the state of contemporary architecture. She surmised that ‘one can be quite certain that the way these buildings are presented is not at all the way architects see the work themselves’. Furthermore, the susceptibility of the projects to easy aesthetic grouping – despite their architects’ claims – confirmed her reading of the show as an indictment of the true motives behind such production: ‘What Mr. Drexler is telling us is that most of these architects have been closet esthetes all along’.32 Drexler had suggested much the same, arguing in the catalogue that ‘narrowing the discussion to aesthetic intent, as much as possible, has the advantage of dealing more directly with what architects choose to do because they think it is beautiful’.33 In privileging visual experience over disciplinary representations and authorial intent, the format of Transformations constituted a near inverse of the only other of Drexler’s exhibitions to rival it in controversy: The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, held four years earlier at MoMA in 1975.34 A comparison between them reveals the degree to which both shows contributed to the emerging sensibilities of postmodernity and Postmodernism in architecture, though in different forms. The influence of the Beaux-Arts show was due primarily to its revisionist content, in re-opening the historical forms and practices of the academic tradition for architectural consumption, a fact credited by numerous architects with the turn in their own work to the introduction of historical forms that became associated with

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Postmodernism after the 1970s. By contrast, the impact of Transformations lay in its deadpan curatorial form as well as its content, as the first architecture exhibition at MoMA to fully embrace the possibilities of postmodernism in the logic of its display as well as in the promiscuity of its chosen examples.35 In this sense, both exhibitions marked out diametrically opposed modes of discourse emanating from the same institution. The Beaux-Arts show was directed primarily to an audience of practitioners, while Transformations addressed a wider audience of ‘laymen’ and architecture students who would be, Drexler suggested, ‘willing to overcome their fears and prejudices’ in a way that the practising architect could not.36 The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts was scholarly and selective; Transformations was popular and inclusive. The Beaux-Arts show consisted exclusively of architectural drawings and renderings of unbuilt projects (the famous concours of the Beaux-Arts academic system), framed individually as original artefacts; the 406 images on display in Transformations consisted almost entirely of photographs of built work, reproduced to form a relentless wallpaper of images. The Beaux-Arts exhibition conformed to the traditional curatorial role of identifying and displaying exceptional work within the gallery, and its influence lay in just the kind of reappraisal and validation of such examples – in this case the products of a historical tradition that had been opposed by avant-garde modernism – that Drexler described as the conventional function of the museum. By contrast, Transformations was resolute in its documentation of the general state of architectural production as it was, evenly and without judgement, explicitly focusing on more works rather than fewer and refusing to provide any criteria that would imply assessment or valuation.37 Its impact lay not just in its registration of the semantic confusion in evidence across this proliferation of architectural forms, but in the inability of critics to read the resulting crisis of classification as an act of curatorial intention, rather than merely as a lack of coherence. As if to confirm the expectations Drexler ascribed to viewers coming to a MoMA show, Paul Goldberger wrote that ‘if “Transformations” could be criticized for anything, it is blandness’. Looking for precisely what the exhibition refused to provide, Goldberger complained – just as Drexler had predicted – that ‘There is no strong point of view, no clear direction to this exhibition, as there have been in most Museum of Modern Art shows of the last decade … That, it seems, is what annoys architects most.’38 Other critics perceived more clearly that the intentions of the show relied on exactly this negation of valuation, though they were less clear about its consequences. Reyner Banham speculated that while ‘Drexler still refuses to come to a point or a conclusion … This not coming to a point is programmatic – it may even be what the show was all about … MoMA exhibitions in the field of architecture and design had always been interpretive, didactic, propagandist. This one was not’.39 While comparing the potential consequences of such a programme to the ‘enormously effective’ example of artist Ed Ruscha’s deadpan photographic collections of parking lots, gas stations and apartment blocks, Banham dismissed

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the works in the exhibition as carrying too much representational baggage ever to be equally free from valuation. ‘Practically every building in this show is an old friend and comes to us trailing banners of interpretation’, he concluded, though he conceded that ‘comparison can be the most destructive, or illuminating, of all forms of interpretation’.

Mirrors of our time In one of her multiple reviews of the exhibition, Ada Louise Huxtable confirmed that Transformations had induced, for discerning (that is, disciplinary) viewers, something of the crisis of classification that Drexler had intended to produce. Yet the show, which had ‘maddened knowledgeable observers with its undifferentiated, deadpan mix of curiosity and creativity and almost perverse cultivation of stylistic excess’, provided Huxtable with more telling clues as to the nature of contemporary architectural production and its relation to the cultural conditions of late capitalism.40 Perceiving the deeper continuities that lay behind the fragmentation of surface appearances on display, Huxtable was nearly alone in suggesting that Transformations ‘proved to be more prescient than propagandistic’ in revealing the increasing scale of these stylistically diverse buildings as well as their increasing concentration in the hands of a growing number of large, international architectural firms. ‘If there is one word to characterize architecture as it stands at the threshold of the 1980’s, it is “big”,’ she wrote. In a second review of the show, Huxtable recognized the predictive value of laying bare the state of practice in these terms, one that relied on foregoing precisely the sort of valuation or advocacy that Drexler had refused to provide: ‘It is not anyone’s idea of whatmight-have-been or what-should-be. It is a record of reality, of some 400 buildings which have been committed to stone, steel, brick, concrete or whatever material was available or in fashion at the time.’41 In claiming to offer simply a mirror of the realities of architectural production as of 1979, then, other principles of curatorial emphasis came to the fore in Transformations, as the necessary obverse of Drexler’s efforts to subvert the conventional modes of selection, classification and evaluation. The most conspicuous determinant of the hierarchy of projects in Transformations was also the most obvious, so much so that it went nearly unrecognized by most other critics of the show: the architects with the most buildings in the show were all large-scale, corporate firms in their structure and output. An inventory of the architects listed in the catalogue reveals how much the production of such offices dominated the selection of works on display. While most of the 200-plus architects included had only one or two images in the exhibition, the numbers were skewed towards a handful of such large firms.42 The dominance of the list of projects by the work of such practices – seventy-nine buildings out of 362 images in the catalogue,

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or nearly 22 per cent, were produced by only eleven out of the 200-plus offices featured (0.05 per cent) – constituted a de facto criteria in which the curatorial selection of work mirrored the quantitative dominance of these firms in the field. Drexler’s interest in the relationship between corporations and architectural practice had begun well before 1979. Buildings for Business and Government (1957), one of Drexler’s first exhibitions as director of the Department of Architecture and Design after his appointment in 1956, traced ‘the important role [of] a new kind of patronage’, corporate and institutional, in ‘changing the face of our country and the face it presents abroad’, through six projects by architects, many of whom would later feature prominently in Transformations.43 The exhibition also marked an early appearance of Drexler’s preoccupation with subverting the conventional presentation of architectural models and drawings to focus on the unmediated experience of the buildings on display by inducing what one reviewer described as the ‘“make-believe,” real-life effect’ produced by ‘staging visual illusions through massive photomurals, models, and simulated building fragments’, including fullscale reproductions of exterior wall sections for three of the projects.44 By the time of Transformations, the emphasis had shifted away from constructing an enhanced realism through such illusionistic spatial devices in favour of an experience of overload, based on a bewildering multiplication of images and referents, while the focus on the quality of singular works had given way to the interchangeable, generic quality of contemporary architecture. (Figure 3.3 and 3.4)

FIGURE 3.3 ‘Structure: Glass Skins’, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 80–81. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979.

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FIGURE 3.4 ‘Structure: Glass Skins’, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 86–87. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979.

Beyond the 400-plus works included in Transformations, the emergence of the new hierarchies of corporate architectural production was reflected in the selection of the photographs through which these works were represented. In an exhibition that relied on the illustrative aspect of images rather than on the inclusion of extra-visual architectural information, Drexler appears to have based the selection of the photographic representations almost entirely on the criteria of the architects and owners of the buildings themselves. The index at the back of the catalogue states: ‘Photographs of buildings reproduced were, in most cases, provided by the architect or the owner, to whom we are most grateful.’45 There is less information on how photographs were selected among the images provided by the architects and clients, or if the architects’ chosen representations were simply accepted as such. In the introduction, however, Drexler confirmed that ‘most of the selections [of photographs] conform to those approved by the architects’. Unsurprisingly, the resulting collection of photographs was dominated by the photo agencies most heavily associated with the corporate imaging of modern architecture in the post-war period. The list of photo sources reveals that the larger number of photographs were the product of sources like Ezra Stoller of Esto (author of thirty-six photographs included in Transformations), The Japan Architect (fifteen photographs), Balthazar Korab (eleven photographs) and Hedrich-Blessing (six photographs).46 The result was a promiscuous mixing

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between photographs produced for business purposes and those produced for discursive venues like the magazine and the museum.47 Despite the variety of styles and formal elements included in the show, the section of Transformations on reflective glass curtain walls attracted the most critical attention. This section was spatially distinct: the projects were shown through illuminated transparencies within a darkened enclosure at the centre of the exhibition.48 Critics repeatedly noted that this was the only section of the exhibition that featured colour photographs, taking this distinction as a sign, as Kenneth Frampton suggested, that ‘the color photographs in the inner sanctum argue the absolute aesthetic superiority of the hermetic skin’.49 In response, Drexler explained his decision to represent the glass buildings through backlit transparencies as a means of capturing their immaterial effects, the better to register a postmodern visual condition in which ‘these buildings have only a halflife as buildings. Their authentic existence is as photographs; only in the photograph can you capture the fleeting reflection of whatever is reflected’.50 Dismissing the critics’ assumption that the colour photographs were meant to exalt glass buildings above the others in the show, Drexler replied harshly: ‘Anyone who reads the text and doesn’t move his lips can come to the conclusion that the person who has organized this feels ambivalent about glass buildings.’51 It was in the context of this luminous invocation of glass that critics called attention to the funding of the exhibition by PPG Industries Foundation, one of two sponsors along with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Judging from the reaction it received, the role of the foundation – the institutional wing of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, a major producer of glass for curtain walls of the type that were featured in the show – was evidently unusual for such an architecture exhibition at MoMA.52 Goldberger opined bluntly that the sponsorship of the Foundation, ‘an arm of the huge glass maker … may explain why color pictures were used to illustrate buildings of glass and no others’.53 Commenting on the ease with which such critics jumped to propose a causal relation between the sponsor and the works shown in the exhibition, Banham alone reversed this equation, venturing (more accurately) that ‘uncharitably, no one suggested that [Drexler] might have gone to PPG Industries Foundation because there were going to be a lot of glass buildings in the show, and they therefore sounded like appropriate sponsors’.54 Such promiscuous relationships between production, sponsorship and display illustrated Drexler’s interest in dismantling the barrier between mainstream architectural practice and the ostensibly canonical domain of the museum. So too, they revealed the unsettling implications of this mixing for both the state of contemporary architecture and its interpretation. Transformations in Modern Architecture thus constituted a problematic episode in the lineage of architecture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and a register for complex changes taking place in design practice by 1979. In her history of MoMA exhibitions,

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Mary Anne Staniszewski writes that after the 1950s ‘The dimensions of design and architecture that are bound to function, consumption, social issues, and commerce’ were increasingly ‘buried … banished somewhere within the unconscious of the Museum’, such that ‘By the 1970s, visual delectation … was, with rare exception, the only thing permitted in the galleries’.55 Transformations, I argue, constituted one such rare exception. In laying bare the flattening of the field to an endless array of stylistically diverse but ultimately generic forms – ‘bewildering, profuse, largely mediocre’ – and in revealing the dominant role of corporate firms among the producers of this chaotic architectural condition, the exhibition manifested a moment of crisis when the presumed disciplinary boundary between the work of ‘corporate’ and ‘avant-garde’ practices ceased to exist for good. The curatorial approach to revealing this crisis relied on the construction of a postmodern visual spectacle in which both fragmentation (across stylistic categories) and repetition (within any single category) were exacerbated to the point of overload. The result was an atmosphere in which the difference and specificity of individual buildings disappeared in a haze of images – most prominently a catalogue of steel and glass curtain-wall grids, both shimmering and mute. Transformations still commands attention as powerful act of curatorial refusal, even if one that went largely undetected by its critics at the time. Drexler sought a deliberate flattening of the normative criteria by which one would expect to judge a MoMA show, in order for the selection and representation of the work to be more clearly determined by other factors that would normally remain invisible. Confronted with the crisis of MoMA’s originary connection to a movement that could no longer sustain itself under the conditions of late-modernist architectural production, Drexler refused to gratify the viewer’s expectations for guidance or synthesis, abdicating the museum’s role as arbiter in matters of judgement that had lost their meaning and which the institution could no longer support. Denying traditional categories of aesthetic evaluation like ‘style’, ‘meaning’ or ‘taste’; forcing upon the viewer a bewildering multiplication of signs and images and refusing any easy means of distinguishing between them; seeking to induce a distracted, alienated mode of experiencing the images on display; aligning the mode of representation of the buildings on display, and the quantitative hierarchies implicit in their selection and distribution, as closely as possible with the economic logics of production and consumption which underlay them – all of these were means by which Drexler sought to reject conventional categories of representation in Transformations in order to allow the realities of contemporary architectural production to appear, free from mystification. If critics of the exhibition failed to see those realities clearly in spite of such radical curatorial tactics, then our experience of their effects over the intervening three decades – a historical distance nearly equal to that of late modernism and postmodernism from their own modernist predecessors – might allow us to look back at the

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exhibition as a double turning point: the moment not only by which the legacy of the pre-war architectural avant-garde was understood to have collapsed for good, but when the economy of architectural production in the post-war period achieved full legibility within one of the discipline’s central spaces of representation.

Notes 1

‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, interview with Andrew MacNair, Skyline (Summer 1979), 6.

2

Hilton Kramer, ‘Beyond the Avant-Garde’, The New York Times Magazine (25 February 1979), 41.

3

This lineage of surveys included Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (MoMA Exhibition #15), 9 February to 23 March 1932; Built in U.S.A. 1932–1944 (MoMA Exhibition #258c), 24 May to 22 October 1944; Built in U.S.A.: Postwar Architecture (MoMA Exhibition #528), 20 January to 15 March 1953 and Modern Architecture: U.S.A. (MoMA Exhibition #767a), 18 May to 6 September 1965. On the impact of the Modern Architecture exhibition and the legacies of Barr Jr and Johnson, see Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1992); John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe, Philip Johnson and The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1998); Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); David A. Hanks, ed., Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015).

4

Kramer, ‘Beyond the Avant-Garde’, 44.

5

Throughout this text I use the capitalized ‘Postmodernism’ to refer to the stylistic category of ‘post-modern architecture’ as it was codified by architectural critics in this period (most conspicuously by Charles Jencks in his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture). I use the term ‘postmodernism’ to refer more broadly to the cultural conditions of postmodernity, identified by Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and others with the financial and political structures of late capitalism, which I argue encompassed the diverse stylistic modes of both Postmodernism and Late Modernism as these were described by critics like Jencks.

6

Arthur Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 15.

7

Irving Howe, The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), vii; quoted in Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 15.

8

Fredric Jameson, ‘Theories of the Postmodern’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 22–31. First published in 1984, Jameson’s essay analyses the major theories of postmodernism and its perceived continuity with or rupture from modernism against these two spectra – pro/anti-modernist and pro/anti-postmodernist – to situate them into four poles: anti-modernist and pro-postmodernist (a position he ascribes to Tom Wolfe and

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Charles Jencks), pro-modernist and pro-postmodernist (Jean-François Lyotard), pro-modernist and anti-postmodernist (Jürgen Habermas), and anti-modernist and anti-postmodernist (Manfredo Tafuri). On the question of the historical continuity or discontinuity of postmodernism with modernism, see also Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984), 5–52. 9

Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 8.

10 Arthur Drexler, Three New Skyscrapers (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983),

6. The three skyscrapers were by Norman Foster Associates (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters in Hong Kong), Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) and Johnson/Burgee (International Place in Boston, Massachusetts). The latter two were the most heavily represented firms in Transformations, with thirty projects included in the catalogue out of 362 images in total. 11 See in particular Felicity D. Scott, ‘When Systems Fail: Arthur Drexler and the

Postmodern Turn’, Perspecta 35 (2004), 134–153. 12 Charles Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980),

8. In contrast to the formal tropes of late modernism, which Jencks regarded as being addressed solely to an architectural audience, he described Postmodernism as being ‘“doubly-coded”, one half Modern and one half something else (usually traditional building), in its attempt to communicate both with the public and a concerned minority’, 7. 13 Charles Jencks, ‘The Rhetoric of Late-Modernism – A Pictorial Essay’, in Late-Modern

Architecture and Other Essays, 31–79. 14 Fredric Jameson, ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land

Speculation’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 186. While Jameson praised Jencks’s ‘wonderful’ descriptions of the glass-and-steel semiotics of late modernity (descriptions which he claimed to ‘cannibalize’ in this essay), he rejected the Jencksian tendency to make too-literal links of ‘thematic self-reference’ from the economies of land speculation and finance capital to the formal aesthetics of late-modern architecture – from base to superstructure, in Marx’s terms – as in his description of Anthony Lumsden’s tower for the oil-rich Bumi Daya Bank in Indonesia as having an ‘oil-slick surface’ whose ripples ‘suggest a series of meanings without naming them’. Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 66 and Jameson, ‘The Brick and the Balloon’, 186. 15 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Cultural Turn:

Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 15. Photographs of Portman & Associates buildings that appeared in Transformations are discussed in Charles Rice, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 16 Jameson, ‘The Brick and the Balloon’, 186. 17 For my purposes here I regard the exhibition and its catalogue as essentially

interchangeable objects of analysis. Drexler described these as being based on the same logic of viewing despite their different formats: ‘In an exhibition variations on a theme can be presented almost simultaneously, the number of direct comparisons being limited chiefly by the 10 or 12 images the eye can take in at once – but expanded

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by the perspectives possible in a gallery. In a book the number of direct comparisons is limited to the images that can be accommodated on facing pages … Thus the groupings feasible in the exhibition, although here substantially retained, have been reduced in quantity and occasionally modified. The result nevertheless includes 362 of the exhibition’s 406 images.’ Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 8. The logic of black-and-white imagery, density and repetition evident in the catalogue is substantially the same as in the exhibition, as are the selection of images, the specific juxtapositions of projects and the aesthetic classification of the projects into chapters. 18 Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (Montreal:

McGill’s-Queens University Press, 1998, first edition Faber and Faber Limited, 1965), p. 17. 19 Jordan Kauffman discusses the re-emergence and market valuation of architectural

drawing practices in this period in Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Drexler’s emphasis on photography as a medium accessible to non-architectural audiences could be seen as a response to Jencks’s classification of late modernism as ‘singly-coded’ – that is, addressed solely to a ‘concerned minority’ of architects – by foregrounding the question of legibility, or illegibility, of such buildings for the public. See Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 7–8. 20 Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 8. 21 Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 8. 22 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, 6. 23 The development of Jencks’s tree began with his ‘ The Evolutionary Tree’,

Architectural Design (October 1970), 527. Subsequent revisions and expansions included versions published in his Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (New York: Praeger, 1971); Modern Movements in Architecture (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973); the revised enlarged edition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1978 ff.) in which the tree begins Part Three, added from the original 1977 edition, and The New Moderns: From Late to Neo-Modernism (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). Jencks later revisited the evolutionary tree retroactively in Architecture 2000 and Beyond: Success in the Art of Prediction (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2000). 24 Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York: Wittenborn

& Company, 1972). Upon hearing of the selection for this section of the exhibition, all four of these architects publicly protested the exclusion of John Hejduk, the fifth member of the so-called ‘New York Five’, confirming that the direct parallel between the book and the exhibition was clearly understood at the time. See Paul Goldberger, ‘Architecture of Last 20 Years Surveyed in Show at Modern’, The New York Times (23 February 1979), C18. For the history of CASE as a precursor to Five Architects, see Stanford Anderson, ‘CASE and MIT: Engagement’, in Arindam Dutta, ed., A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and SA+P Press, 2013), 578–650. 25 Work in Progress: Architecture by Johnson, Roche, Rudolph (MoMA Exhibition #940),

2 October 1970 to 3 January 1971. Transformations included ten projects by Philip Johnson and Roche/Dinkeloo and Partners respectively, and five projects by Paul Rudolph.

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26 James Stirling: Three University Buildings (MoMA Exhibition #859), 11 June to 4

August 1968; Louis Kahn: 1901–1974 (MoMA Exhibition #1056b), 22 March to 7 April 1974. 27 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum

of Modern Art, 1966). A mention of Complexity and Contradiction begins the text on Venturi in the Transformations catalogue. 28 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, 6. 29 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, 6. Despite (or perhaps

in parallel with) his stated disavowal of advocacy or the valuation of authorial intent on the part of the curator, in the same year as Transformations Drexler became allied with what would become the privileged apparatus for the validation of genius and originality in the profession: the Pritzker Prize, begun in 1979. Drexler was a Consultant to the Jury of the Pritzker until his death in 1987. The winners of this architectural ‘Oscar’ during Drexler’s tenure included Philip Johnson (1979), James Stirling (1981), Kevin Roche (1982) and I.M. Pei (1983). 30 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’. 31 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, 6. 32 Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘Mirrors of Our Time’, The New York Times Magazine (25

February 1979), 6, 8. 33 Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 7. 34 The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts (MoMA Exhibition #1110), 29 October

1975 to 4 January 1976. 35 In this regard it is relevant to note that the closest precedent for the immersive

photographic display of Transformations was an early modernist example, Herbert Bayer’s design for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1930). 36 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’. 37 As the organization of Transformations took shape, Drexler gradually eliminated

any elements that might have suggested a curatorial hierarchy among the works on display. According to Paul Goldberger, the original plans for the exhibition would have centred more prominently on unbuilt projects, particularly three specially commissioned works by Gaetano Pesce, Allan Greenberg and Roger Ferri. During preparation, Drexler altered the exhibition concept to a ‘scrapbook’ of 400 projects that would include only built work represented through photographs. See Paul Goldberger, ‘A Quarrel Over Architecture’, The New York Times (8 March 1979), C18. The protest by these architects over the removal of their projects at the late stages of the show resulted in the three projects being shown separately in two smaller exhibitions, one running concurrently with Transformations: Gaetano Pesce: Projects for a Skyscraper (MoMA Exhibition #1252), 2 March to 10 April 1979, and Architectural Projects by Roger Ferri and Allan Greenberg (MoMA Exhibition #1265), 2 June to 15 July 1979. 38 Goldberger, ‘A Quarrel Over Architecture’. 39 Reyner Banham, ‘MoMA’s Architectural Mystery Tour’, AIA Journal 69, 7 (June 1980), 56.

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40 Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘Architecture: “Bigger – And Maybe Better”’, The New York

Times (26 August 1979), 25. 41 Huxtable, ‘Mirrors of Our Time’, 6. 42 The list is dominated by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (with twenty projects included

in the catalogue), Johnson/Burgee (ten projects), Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates (ten projects), I.M. Pei & Partners (seven projects), and Edward Larrabee Barnes (six projects). These are followed by a number of firms with four or five projects, including John Portman & Associates, Paul Rudolph, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, John Carl Warnecke & Associates, Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, and Marcel Breuer & Associates. 43 Buildings for Business and Government (MoMA Exhibition #615), 27 February to 28

April 1957. The exhibition featured six buildings: Eero Saarinen and Associates (the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan), SOM (one commission for business, the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and one for government, the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (the Seagram Building in New York), Hellmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber (the St. Louis Air Terminal), and Edward Durrell Stone (the US Embassy in New Delhi, India). See typescript of press release, ‘Buildings for Business and Government’, 27 February 1957. Exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Architecture and Design. 44 Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations

at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 199. These simulations included a section of the Seagram headquarters façade that extended between floor and ceiling mirrors, multiplying the image of the façade above and below to give the viewer the ‘sensation of [the] tangible reality of [a] 38-story building’, 199. 45 ‘Photo Sources’, in Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 167. 46 ‘Photo Sources’, in Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 167. 47 For an exhibition so dedicated to the levelling of representation and the neutrality of

visual comparison, we might ask why Drexler would have been so accepting of the decidedly non-neutral representations offered by the architects and owners of these buildings. Expediency would undoubtedly have prohibited MoMA from undertaking a consistent photographic documentation of hundreds of buildings selected from all over the globe. But the question also suggests a willingness on Drexler’s part to accept, perhaps even to conflate and reveal, the representational logic of these producers of both architectural and photographic images as the visual logic of Transformations itself. 48 The catalogue repeated the visual contrast between illuminated images of glass

curtain walls and the monochrome installation by reproducing these shimmering colour photographs on the front and back cover and flaps, where they appear in stark contrast to the strictly black-and-white printing of the book. 49 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Blow Up’, Skyline (April 1979), 6. 50 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’: my emphasis. 51 MacNair, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, 6.

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52 The fact that Philip Johnson was commissioned to design a new all-glass headquarters

for PPG in Pittsburgh (1981–1984) a few years after Transformations suggests a closer affinity between corporate taste and the aesthetic categories on display in the exhibition than any direct influence of PPG on Drexler’s selection, though such a connection was tacitly assumed by many of the show’s critics. For a compelling reading of the relationship between multinational corporations and the aesthetics of mirror glass, see Reinhold Martin, ‘Materiality: Mirrors’, in Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 93–122. 53 Goldberger, ‘Architecture of Last 20 Years Surveyed in Show at Modern’, C19. 54 Banham, ‘MoMA’s Architectural Mystery Tour’, 56. This was a more correct

description of how the corporation came to be involved, as evidenced by Drexler’s letters to the Foundation to solicit funding for the transparencies he sought for the glass section of the exhibition. See Drexler, letter to Grace Voegler of the PPG Industries Foundation, 7 March 1978. Exhibition files, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Architecture and Design. 55 Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 201.

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PART II

INTERNATIONAL POSTMODERNISMS: MICRO-NARRATIVES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO ARCHITECTURE

4 REIMA PIETILÄ’S (POSTMODERN) MORPHOLOGIES EEVA-LIISA PELKONEN

This essay discusses three exhibitions conceived by the Finnish architect Reima Pietilä (1923–1993) between 1960 and 1972, respectively Morphology-Urbanism, The Zone and Space Garden. Although I am hesitant to apply a label ‘postmodern’ to characterize this body of work, I would suggest that these exhibitions, and Pietilä’s work in general, share certain aspects with work that we associate with that category, namely an interest in how architecture communicates meaning, and the instability of that very meaning. While Pietilä is often considered as a heir to Aalto’s ‘organic’ approach to architecture, my article will demonstrate a clear distance-taking from the humanism of his famous predecessor. With Pietilä we can no longer count on organic unity of the work; instead, the work opens up to an ever-expanding vortex of possible formal configurations and meanings. Pietilä was undisputedly the most singular figure in Finnish architecture culture, not least because of his broad intellectual curiosity and theoretical bent. He started his architectural office in 1956 by winning the Finnish Pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair, collaborating with his wife Raili from 1960 onwards. In addition to practising he was a frequent contributor to both domestic and international publications; served as a professor of architecture at Oulu University from 1973 to 1979; was a founding editor of one of the one of the famous little magazines, The original version of this essay was delivered as a paper at the bi-annual European Architecture History Network Third International Meeting in Turin in June 2014. A longer version was presented as a keynote speech at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre’s second annual conference entitled ‘Research on Display’, which took place in December 2015. I thank Léa-Catherine Szacka and Véronique Patteeuw, and Dirk van den Heuval, respectively, for inviting me to speak at these events.

Le Carré Bleu; and curated some half-dozen exhibitions, many of which travelled abroad. He gained international fame for the Dipoli Student Center (1961–1966), which he won in an open public competition with Alvar Aalto chairing the jury – a testimony to their mutual affinity for architecture that mimics forms found in nature adapting, in Pietilä’s case, the dramatic rock formations of the site. By the time of his death in 1993 he was a member of the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences and widely regarded as somewhat of a state architect.1 In addition to being considered a public intellectual in his home country, Pietilä participated actively in international architecture debates as a member of the Team Ten and was a founding member of its Finnish chapter called PTAH – an acronym for Progrès Technique Architecture Helsinki, as well as an Egyptian demiurge, god of architects and craftsmen – whose name exemplified the play with meanings that Pietilä so well mastered. Involvement with various international meetings taught him that architecture is a subject of research and debate. Two years after attending the seminal Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) X meeting in Dubrovnik in the summer of 1956 – the year he graduated from the Technical University of Helsinki – he founded, together with architects Aulis Blomstedt (1906–1979), Keijo Petäjä (1919–1988) and the art historian Kyösti Ålander (1917–1975), the director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (MFA) at the time, Le Carré Bleu as a platform for advancing their shared interest in the study of architectural form to counter the rigid form-follows-function dogma that the group members saw governing urban planning and housing construction in their country. Pietilä edited and designed some of the early issues as part of a longer research project dedicated to the study of architectural morphology in order to open architectural form to a rich set of influences and associations. These early issues of the magazine demonstrate Pietilä’s conceptual acumen and ability to approach architectural ideas in multiple registers – writing, graphic compositions, conceptual models, architectural plans and exhibition – in a manner where one medium folds seamlessly into another. In what follows, I will show that such trans-medial and cross-medial encounters were used as a tool to expand the cultural echo chamber of architecture beyond its narrow disciplinary confines, challenging the various modernist dogmas in favour of indeterminacy. The 1960 exhibition Morphology-Urbanism serves as an example: the exhibition panels morphed into a special issue of the accordion-shaped Le Carré Bleu magazine, which, when spread out, reveals a series of figures with myriad associations: diagonal constellation of curvilinear lines and figures (landforms?) followed by aggregates of diagonal lamellar figures (referencing Russian constructivism, perhaps?) (Figure 4.1). Printed in white and blue – blue as in blueprint (a nod to technical drawings?) without captions, only a few scale indicators reveal that some of the seemingly similar figures actually represent architectural plans. As we will learn later, many more publications with additional layers of meaning were to follow. Architecture as a cultural art form was born out of such open-ended play with meanings.

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FIGURE 4.1 Studies titled ‘Études de morphologie en urbanisme par Reima Pietilä.’ Reproduced from Le Carré Bleu 3 (1960): foldout.

Cross-referencing media becomes here both a generative design tool and a means to engage the viewer in the production of meaning. As a result, in order to gain access to Pietilä’s oeuvre one has to let go of the ideas of a singular work, of disciplinary boundaries and media specificity, as his works often unravel into an expansive morphological field. Neither can we make sense of Pietilä as an individual author who had achieved idiosyncratic expression within a particular cultural and historical context, but rather somebody swerving his way through the history of ideas, images and concepts, moving fluidly across time and space. The exhibition Morphology-Urbanism and its adjacent publications bring to mind Umberto Eco’s contemporaneous notion of ‘open work’, which is structurally indeterminate, a ‘work in movement’ where the work is constantly being reinterpreted and reinvented by both the architect and the user.2 It is worth mentioning that later in his career Pietilä helped to introduce, almost single-handedly, postmodernism into Finland through his activities as a theoretician, architect and educator. I would argue that the foundation of this introduction was laid through these morphological studies that led him to embrace complexity and indeterminacy of form – sensibilities and intellectual positions that we now associate with postmodern discourse. I believe that these sensibilities were actually most pronounced in various conceptual projects during this early period, rather than in the later built work where postmodernism gains a more explicitly symbolic dimension. Take the bird-shaped Metso, as the Tampere Main Library is called, completed in 1986; while continuing to project the opening up architectural form to new influences, the outcome is locked into a single point of reference. The instability of meaning is perhaps best captured in his exhibitions because of their ability to function not only as transit points between architecture and art as well as other disciplines, but also between different media and audiences. In what follows I will trace how Pietilä came to discover this destabilizing potential in exhibition as a medium.

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The story begins with the CIAM Grid, a system of displaying projects launched at the CIAM 8 meeting that took place in Bergamo, Italy, in 1949. At the congress, each project was to be presented on 21 cm × 33 cm panels placed in a grid consisting of five horizontal rows and nine vertical columns according to set criteria. The horizontal bands designated functions listed on the left column with colourcoding (living/green, work/red, cultivation of body and spirit/blue, circulation/ yellow and miscellaneous/white), while the vertical bands were designated to various thematic classifications (e.g. environment, occupation of the land, etc.). The goal was to facilitate easy comparison between different projects. The system considered also how the panels were to be produced, reproduced, transported, presented – either individually on a mantelpiece during informal talks, mounted on a free-standing folder display wall for exhibition purposes, or scaled down and reprinted for publication purposes. Yet, the grid was hardly conceived as a solution to a practical problem but rather as an epistemological paradigm, a method, or as Le Corbusier put it: a ‘tool for thinking and tool for transmitting thought’, and surely not a neutral one at that. What Le Corbusier hailed as ‘poetry of classification’ began by laying down universal principles that could be applied to any context with the mission to ‘put things in order … to construct a mental architecture amid the chaos’.3 It comes, therefore, as no surprise that the grid became controversial as soon as it was introduced, not least because of its bias towards deductive method and universal principles. At Bergamo many younger members of CIAM had voiced criticism against its overall rigidity and lack of cultural substance, pointing out, among other things, elimination of historical, cultural and aesthetic concerns. The most famous of the subsequent experiments into the format was Alison and Peter Smithson’s ‘Urban Reidentification Grid’, presented at the 1953 CIAM 9 meeting in Aix-en-Provence, which replaced Le Corbusier’s functional categories with what they called ‘scales of association – “house, street, relationship, district, and city”’4 – underlining in their own way that architecture’s main task was to foster human belonging rather than simply fulfil functions. Nigel Henderson’s photographs of children playing hopscotch, leaping out of the frame, mark the epistemological shift from the eternal and the universal to the ephemeral and the belief that human life could not be harnessed into narrow functional categories. Yet perhaps most importantly, Smithson’s take on the grid marks a major epistemological shift towards the idea that architecture should begin with empirical research, that is inductively, by mining existing conditions, rather than deductively, based on universal criteria. Note also how exhibitions become a platform for collaboration, which further expanded not only the criteria but also the range of media used to explore architectural ideas, while the viewer is invited to step into the shoes of the photographer capturing the unfolding events. All in all, the exhibition shifts from conveying information to engaging the viewer in how knowledge is produced and communicated.

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Pietilä, too, was indoctrinated by the CIAM Grid; he presented a project called ‘Arctic City’ in Dubrovnik, which was composed of twenty ‘grid’ panels depicting an urban project that consisted of a string of housing units organized along a circular underground mass-transit system. Like the Smithsons, Pietilä, also, took the viewer through the thought process by showing how an abstract organizational diagram adapts to a particular site. The formal language of the final scheme with its rugged irregular shapes and edges resulted from an adaptation to the topography, pioneering the blending of built form and landform operative in Pietilä’s subsequent morphological studies and a trademark of his later architectural projects. Such ‘inbetween’ thinking had a family resemblance to what Robert Venturi embraced in his 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as desirable ambiguity, able to engage the viewer in a creation of meaning. The project demonstrates one of the most important lessons the CIAM Grid taught the young architects working in the shadow of the generation of the socalled Modern Masters, namely that architectural ideas could be studied and communicated in a visual manner. At this point, exhibition as a medium started to challenge the traditional split between intellectual (verbal) and aesthetic (visual) pursuits based on the premise that ‘every argument should be able to play itself visually, and conversely, that every aesthetic arrangement was an intellectual argument’.5 Where words often lock meaning, images seemed to open up for endless associations and transformations. Unleashing this productive capacity of form was the goal behind Pietilä’s first exhibition, Morphology-Urbanism, which took place in the Pinx Gallery in Helsinki in 1960. The first generative act was to dislocate, as it were, architecture into the realm of art, which made the point that architecture should liberate itself not only from the functionalist imperative but from the rationalist mindset altogether; Instead of verbal and rational reasoning, architecture should be based on an openended formal play. On display, 96 × 104 cm panels featured rather abstract figures depicting an alternative to the standard method of conceiving buildings, where built form and landform collaborated in creating a varied set of figures challenging the spaces of landscape and architecture. The chosen setting for the exhibition – an art gallery – even conditioned viewers to suspend all preconceived notions of what architecture should look like. As a result, the figures depicted in the panels could in fact be enjoyed as art before they were read as urban and housing plans. Also, the few models on display, like the one of the Kaleva Church in Tampere (1959–1966), were rendered without the information related to a particular scale and programme. As a result, all items on display celebrated the open-ended morphological fluidity that allowed forms to be read in different registers all at once. The special issue of the magazine Le Carré Bleu devoted to the theme ‘Studies in the Morphology of Urbanism’ played with these ambiguities, not least the one built into its very format and title as a ‘blue square’ – yet another sign infested

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with multiple references, as Mondrian’s painting Composition II with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930) and Malevich’s Black Square (1915) had been. Yet, despite this nod to the legacy of modernist abstraction it is worth noting Pietilä’s ambivalent relationship to the modernist legacy, which he seems to simultaneously adapt and reject. Take, for example, the composition depicted in the issue that recalls Kasimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings: Pietilä’s study seems to lack a sense of harmony and balance, communicating instead a sense of indeterminacy, even entropy, which was not part of the avant-garde project. The matter never seemed to settle into clear figural form as the viewer is invited to consider the relationship between figure and background, and parts to the whole. The fact that the issue of Le Carré Bleu dedicated to the theme ‘Morphologie – Urbanisme’ was printed in blue underscores Pietilä’s ‘cross-media thinking’:6 a technique that we normally associate with architectural drawing, allowed to migrate into a magazine. Another example of such mixing was the very format of the magazine – folded rather than bound, which allowed it to be read in a non-linear manner, displayed like a scaled-down version of the exhibition. In reverse, the idea that a formal composition could be blown up, first to the scale of the exhibition and furthermore to the scale of housing and urban plans, where the experience gains a phenomenological dimension engaging the whole body, is a further example of Pietilä’s mastery of switching from one medium to another in a fluid way. This was also the case with the exhibition itself. Rather than a final statement or outcome, it was also conceived as a platform for an ongoing research and conversation to be conducted in other media and registers. In addition to the issue of Le Carré Bleu, the exhibition sponsored a foldout portfolio section in an issue of Finnish Architectural Review dedicated to urban planning, where a selection of panels were printed as red and white figures against black background. It is important to note that these two publications had very different audiences. While Le Carré Bleu had an international public following the sophisticated Team Ten circuit, the readership of The Finnish Architectural Review consisted of members of the Finnish Architectural Association (SAFA) in addition to a small international audience. Hence, if the issue of the former had engaged its readers in the process of an ambiguous form-generation, the latter underlined the more didactic message complemented by the article ‘Kaavan Kaava’, a word play that could be translated into something like ‘Diagram of a Zoning Plan’, which made a case for formal autonomy as a means to fight the narrow-minded functionalist and economic imperative that governed the planning of most housing areas in Finland. Pietilä thus used the exhibition as a platform to sponsor conversation among different audiences through different media platforms and in different discursive registers. His archives, now held at the MFA, include a manifesto on the topic to be presented at the Team Ten meeting in Bagnols-sur-Cèze in 1960, which he did not end up attending.7 The exhibition itself travelled to the

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Museum of Central Finland as part of the interdisciplinary Jyväskylä Summer Seminar, where it engaged a broader audience in public debate on the role of visual arts in national planning policies. The number of exhibition reviews published in the mainstream media is significant, considering the theoretical nature of the exhibition – a testament to Pietilä’s ability to adapt to the requirements of media and their specific audiences.8 The research into architectural morphology gained its most theoretical register, in the essay ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’ published in 1958 in Le Carré Bleu magazine.9 Here it is worth noting that the debate on architectural form had been dominated by the discourse on proportions; think, for example, of Le Corbusier’s Modulor (1948), the 1951 symposium at the Milan Triennale entitled ‘Primo Convegno Internazionale sulle Proporzioni nelle Arti’ and the parallel exhibition La Mostra di Studi sulle Proporzioni.10 In Finland, Aulis Blomstedt had followed suit by publishing in 1957 his own proportional system entitled ‘Modular variations of the 180 cm measure’, printed in the first issue of Le Carré Bleu. Opposed to the idea that architectural form should be governed by such mathematical systems, Pietilä wrote in the subsequent issue of the magazine dedicated to morphology, which he edited: Until the present day, architectural morphology has been essentially founded on the application of a body of rules pertaining to Euclidean geometry … The theoretical systems developed in the field of composition have been inflexible, marked by real scholastic narrowness, heterogeneous and full of contradictions; in short, lifeless codes from which it long ago became impossible to derive any further profit.11 Importantly, Pietilä defines his project as open-ended ‘research’, acknowledging that, as far as architecture is concerned, ‘they are many-factored complexes, as well as the resultants of different formative process, the phenomena of art are open to unlimited interpretation’.12 Furthermore, he acknowledges: ‘It is probably that art analysis will never be able entirely to do without the method of nonmathematized, intuitive articulation,’13 making a further nod to the idea that architecture should not be approached through fixed formulas. Importantly, he uses the word ‘morphology’ to refer both to the qualities of actual physical objects and to human activity, consisting of composing, creating and making, as well as interpreting and responding to form. Pietilä’s morphology was hardly motivated by a striving towards universal harmony and order, which fueled those interested in proportional systems. Instead, his mindset and method could be characterized as entropic, tending towards singularity of experience as an ‘occasion of openness to mystery and wonder in the midst of empirical experience’, a sense that the world was more complex than was proposed by his predecessors and that man might not

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occupy the centre of it, after all.14 To put it in philosophical terms, for Pietilä architecture did not belong to the ‘exact essences’ like mathematics, as many of his contemporaries would argue, but to what Edmund Husserl called ‘morphological essences’; that is, phenomena too complex to reduce to any mathematical formula. This new epistemological paradigm exposed the observer to what one author called a ‘transfinite’ rather than ‘finite’ dimension of reality.15 Everything was connected through patterns and form, albeit never settling into a system of singular mathematical order or semantic meaning. The so-called ‘stick studies’ accompanying ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’ help us to decipher how Pietilä conceived form to operate. A set of photographs depict three-dimensional studies made of wood where an ‘operational unit’ – a rectangular piece of wood – proliferates according to a set of rules to form aggregates around a longer piece in a somewhat random manner. They exemplify the approach that endorses indeterminacy, variability and ‘casual findings made during the development process itself ’ by the maker while designing. Pietilä acknowledges that the process was never terminated as it never reached the point of ultimate completion and perfection; the author simply gained at one point a ‘growing feeling that the balance of combinatory relationships would change radically, and the composition possibly lose its essential character, should more parts be added thereto’.16 The word ‘intuition’ comes up again and again, albeit without the usual association of the kind of idiosyncratic touch invested in a work by a creative genius in total control of the enterprise. Instead, form as such is here granted independent of generative powers partly, and beyond the control of the artists. The acknowledgement that ‘new forms seem to flow from mysterious sources of spatial infinity’17 suggests that the designer’s role was simply to respond and make choices along the way. In other words, the design process was conceived as an endless feedback loop rather than a one-way road where the author has complete control of the outcome. To borrow Henri Focillon’s famous dictum, forms had life of their own.18 Therefore, rather than creating all-encompassing world-systems, those equipped with a morphological mindset embraced the boundless notion of creativity even to the point that one could be surprised by where a process might lead. A project entitled, somewhat humorously, ‘Le Pied de Géant’ [A Giant’s Feet], published in Le Carré Bleu in 1959, provides an example. Pietilä outlined the steps as follows: (1) Choose intuitively a spatial and material object – in this case a giant’s foot – as a subject for morphological analysis; (2) Subject the object to formal study with a goal of discovering an abstract structural pattern that governs the form; and (3) Allow the system to produce alternative configurations. Key to such morphological exercises was to open up what could be called ‘moments of transfer’ when the formal study of particular phenomena – in this case a foot – produces new knowledge that could be applied to another realm.19 Here Pietilä’s idea of morphology has close affinity to the meaning it gains in the area of linguistic

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morphology, where the concept it used to celebrate the possibility of ‘inflection’ and ‘derivation’ of meaning, and the ability to form ‘compounds’.20 Clearly Pietilä’s morphological studies were not based on any a priori mathematical system nor did they endorse the idea of universal harmony such systems were based on. At the same time he does not seem to completely reject an idea of a measurement altogether, but rather than using it to limit options he proliferates it to the point of breakdown, offering glimpses of moments in the process where the work could go in any direction along the way. All in all, compared to those of his contemporaries, Pietilä’s explorations into systems that govern form-making bear witness to taking a certain distance from the humanist underpinnings of high modernism, which places artist and the viewer at the centre of a coherent unified world picture. To paraphrase Hans Sedlmeyer’s book Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert’s als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit which had originally been published in German 1948 and translated into English in 1957: the centre had been lost. Pietilä’s fellow travellers to the land of indeterminacy and entropy can be mostly found in the realm of the arts. Work of many post-minimalist artists like Carl Andre or Robert Smithson share, for example, similar moments of dislocation, where the work opens up to change and randomness.21 With these artists, Pietilä can be credited for introducing a crack in this world picture; a sense that the world is more complex than was proposed by their predecessors. They all share an obsession with a singularity of experience that presents the author and the viewer with what Nathan A. Scott in ‘The Broken Center’ called the ‘transfinite dimension’ of reality.22 Importantly, none of them lament this loss, there is a beauty discovered amidst the polyphony of various viewpoints, meanings and multifacetedness of artistic experience. This interest in the synchronicity between the visual and the aural, the form and language was the subject matter of Pietilä’s second exhibition, entitled The Zone, which took place in the architect’s office in 1968 before travelling to Oulu and Lund in Sweden (Figure 4.2). It consisted of forty c. 2.5 m × 2.5 m transparencies painted with colourful patterns which were accompanied by what could be called ‘language poems’, which played with analogies between forms and sounds often in humorous ways. Strips of concave and convex forms were juxtaposed with the following lines: hollow and pump hollow in bump and bump in hollow hollow in hollow and bump in bump hollow’s bump in bump’s hollow hollow’s bump’s bump in bump’s hollow’s hollow It is hardly to translate to English the onomatopoetic nature of the Finnish language and the physicality of these words. As an extension of Pietilä’s study of morphology, this second exhibition mined the very simultaneity of vision

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FIGURE 4.2 Reima Pietilä’s ‘Vyöhyke’ (The Zone) exhibition, from Finnish Architectural Review 1 (1968).

and thought, much in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero) (1953). Here, words are used in a manner that override their conventional role in architecture exhibitions and publications: to provide information and descriptions in the form of a wall text and/or captions. Revealing his nascent interest in semiotic systems, Pietilä achieved this by underlining the

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phonetic materiality of the words, letting them carry the meaning in an unmediated way. The emphasis on the oral also made the point that every language had its idiosyncratic ways to talk about architecture – another nod to previous research into how human beings associate with a particular place. If Morphology-Urbanism had emphasized the visual, the emphasis on the aural dimension of the spoken word provided yet another complex set of associations. In the introductory essay, Pietilä defines ‘Zone’ as a place where the two realms – thinking and seeing, form and language – meet, and continues: ‘the exhibition name, THE ZONE, is more than just a name; it is illustrative of the way of thinking behind the whole exhibition. The boundary area where two field meet is a zone’.23 It is worth noting that the very name of the exhibition – Zone – emphasized the immersive nature of the new hybrid. New was also a sense of what could be called a temporal echo chamber, that is the idea that a viewer would carry the exhibition with him/her after leaving the exhibition. Pietilä describes how this happens: These pictures are open and semi-open frameworks for happenings, formulae. If we want them to make contact with each other, we must think up a real task and content for them. Then the pictures can also acquire a relationship to reality. They start to re-organize it. New autonomous entities are produced by direct pictorial means.24 He explains, ‘I can see already how this crowd of pictures is growing and taking on new expressions. A constant queue of pictorial connections is forming. I think I can make an adequate chain of proof – if I want to’.25 Pietilä is enticed about the open-ended abundance of associations sponsored by the complicated feedback loop between visual imagery and a mind searching for words and concepts, sounds and meanings to fit those words both within and extended beyond the spatial and temporal realm of the exhibition. Herein lay its radical social potential: forms could actually condition our thoughts. Pietilä was aware of the many registers and cognitive processes that operated in and through architecture. It was exactly this open-endedness and movement that made architecture – for him – into a cultural practice. It comes therefore as no surprise that the research into the genesis and meaning of architectural form culminates in an exhibition where the viewer is physically embedded in an environment of images and language, emblematically called Space Garden (1971) (figure 4.3). It consisted of twenty-five bent acrylic panels with coloured stick-on depicting figures and words crafted on them that formed a kind of spatial labyrinth. The panels were organized around different thematic rubrics, such as ‘Typological Space’, ‘Light Space’, ‘Contrast Space’, ‘Forest as Space’, ‘Regional Space’, ‘Space of Urban Events’, ‘Foundations of Environment’. Here the two-dimensional graphs of the two previous exhibitions exploded into a three-dimensional environment. The visitor is invited to meander in their midst

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and is exposed to the visuals all at once. As such, the exhibition simulates the way the mind works, absorbing and responding to a whole gamut of information at once. The concept ‘environment’ [ympäristö] entered Pietilä’s lexicon at this point. It culminated in many ways the intellectual ambitions present at the Morphology-Urbanism and The Zone exhibitions, by combining elements that make up the phenomenal world, or, as Pietilä called it, the ‘experiential reality’ [todellistila]. It is also clear that Pietilä’s intellectual framework had expanded at this point. He talked, for example, about ‘space galaxy’ – a direct nod to Marshall McLuhan’s famous 1962 book Gutenberg Galaxy, suggesting that the environment consists of ‘perpetually interacting forms that have gone through kaleidoscopic transformation’ as new technologies and insertions stir the pot. Another conceptual premise borrowed from McLuhan was the ‘fragment’

FIGURE 4.3 Reima Pietilä working on the Space Garden exhibition with his co-workers, c. 1972.

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[sirpale], which comes close to McLuhan’s idea of the ‘mosaic approach’, emphasizing the synergy rather than the autonomy of elements in a visual field.26 In Pietilä’s words: ‘Architectural forms are like broken object aphorism [esine aforismi], and architectural form-giving resembles that of an archeologist working with fragments’.27 Like McLuhan’s, Pietilä’s notion of the environment is never completely new or isolated but contains the mnemonic code of other sites and past events – very much like a garden. In addition to his claim that spatial experience is always synchronic rather than diachronic, the very title ‘Space Garden’ makes a case for space as a sensuous, physical and all-in-all ‘heterotopic’ entity that we not only occupy but which is an inseparable part of life. The exhibition format entailed the ‘message’: the viewer merged with words, symbols and charts, and formal silhouettes as cats and birds, trees and houses made their appearances, making a strong case that human beings and architecture co-existed as part of the larger environment. Importantly, the viewer was no longer a mere observer but ‘cohabited’ the complex environment with the figures on display. The word ‘garden’ in the title was apt to describe the colourful, multi-sensory, and somewhat cacophonic visual world that would never settle into one harmonic chord. A panel was made available for visitors to write their comments – a gesture that underlined that a human being inhabited and ultimately shaped this galaxy, adding to its expansive complexity. The desire to let go of authorship that accompanied these gestures brought the project as the indeterminacy of form full circle. All in all, while Pietilä hardly put forward a coherent theoretical proposal or manifesto in a manner sought by some of the modernists in the earlier part of the century, it is exactly this type of discourse that merged different genres and registers that we might associate with postmodern architecture. One might conclude that, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, this type of hybrid ‘theoretical discourse’ is one of the manifestations of postmodernism.28 To be sure, his theoretical position was neither fully formulated nor stable, but rather a process of various encounters with his fellow travellers in the land of indeterminacy. As a whole, Pietilä’s exhibitions reveal the increased emphasis of human experience. While Morphology-Urbanism made the eye create an endless association between forms from different realms, the Zone exhibition recalled Jameson’s observation that ‘as meaning is lost, the materiality of words become obsessive, as in the case when children repeat a word over and over again until its sense is lost and it becomes an incomprehensible incantation’.29 Finally, Space Garden recalled Jameson’s discussion about ‘transformation of reality into images [and of] fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual present’.30 As such, the exhibitions delivered what Pietilä seemed to have searched for all along: to turn architecture into a wide-reaching cultural practice celebrating the indeterminacy of meaning as a new kind of humanism; one where the particular overrides the universal.

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Notes 1

In the interests of full disclosure: I worked at what was then Raili and Reima Pietilä Architects in 1984 and 1985.

2

Here I am referring to Umberto Eco’s 1962 book Opera Aperta, which was published in English as The Open Work in 1989.

3

Le Corbusier, “Description of the CIAM Grid, Bergamo 1949,” in Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, ed. The Heart of the City (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952), 174.

4

ibid., 172.

5

Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 201.

6

I borrow this term from Leah Dickerman’s essay ‘Abstraction, 1910–1925’, October 13 (Winter 2013), 5.

7

Blomstedt attended the meeting and might have presented it on Pietilä’s behalf.

8

According to contemporary reviews the exhibition was set to travel to Turku and later to Oslo. I have yet to confirm whether these plans held and if they did, what venues in those cities might have hosted the show.

9

The article was published in the second issue of Le Carré Bleu magazine, 1 (1958). The first one was numbered 0 (1958), and came out earlier that year.

10 The introductory statement by the curator of the Milan exhibit Carla Marzoni

embodies the dominant ethos of the era: ‘This exhibition aims to bring together cultures of various ages and far away countries on the basis of universal harmony which, without in any way limiting invention, informs and supports every creation of man, both artistic and scientific, as well as technical.’ See Carla Marzoni, ed., Catalogo della Nona Triennale di Milano: Studi sulle Proporzioni. Mostra Bibliografica (Catalogue of the Ninth Milan Triennale: Study on Proportions. Bibliographic Exhibition) (Milano: La Bibliofila, 1951), 5. 11 Reima Pietilä, ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’, Le Carré Blue 1 (1959). 12 Pietilä, ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’, 4. 13 Pietilä, ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’, 4. 14 Here I would refer to Alexander Nagel’s discussion of 1960s art in Medieval Modern:

Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 150–151, where he references Hans Sedlmayr’s influential 1948 book Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, translated into English in 1957 as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center. 15 Nathan A.Scott, The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern

Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). Quoted by Nagel in Medieval Modern, 151. 16 Reima Pietilä, ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’, Le Carré Bleu 1 (1958), 2. 17 Pietilä, ‘The Morphology of Expressive Form’, 3.

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18 Here I refer to Focillon’s famous book Vie de Forms published in French in 1934 and

translated into English as The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Press, 1989). 19 The steps are loosely paraphrased from the article ‘The Giant’s Foot; Composition by

Reima Pietilä,’ Le Carré Bleu 3 (1959), unnumbered. 20 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology (linguistics). 21 My reading of Carl Andre and Robert Smithson is influenced by Alexander Nagel. See

Nagel, Medieval Modern, 151. 22 Nathan A. Scott, quoted by Nagel in Medieval Modern, 151. 23 Reima Pietilä, “Vyohyke/Zone, Arkkitehti 1 (1968), 51. 24 Nathan A. Scott, quoted by Nagel in Medieval Modern, 151. 25 Nathan A. Scott, quoted by Nagel in Medieval Modern, 151. 26 See Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

2011, orig. 1962), 49. 27 Reima Pietilä, Tilatarha, exhibition catalogue (Helsinki: self-published, 1971) 44. 28 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster, ed.,

Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985, c. 1983), 112, where the author writes: ‘Is the work of Michel Foucault, for example, to be called philosophy, history, social theory or political science? It’s undecidable, as they say nowadays; and I will suggest that such “theoretical discourse” is also to be numbered among the manifestations of postmodernism.’ 29 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 120. 30 Frederick Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster, ed.

Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 125.

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5 ISSUES OF REALISM: ARCHITHESE , POSTMODERNISM AND SWISS ARCHITECTURE, 1971–1986 IRINA DAVIDOVICI

‘New directions in Swiss architecture? One is tempted to say: there are none’. Stanislaus von Moos’s opening statement to an anthology of 1960s Swiss architecture, part of Braziller’s global series ‘New Directions in Architecture’, illustrated an impasse characteristic of the late modernist period.1 Despite the high quality of projects by Atelier 5, Alfred Roth or Ernst Gisel, von Moos’s scepticism regarding ‘new’ paths on the well-trodden territory of Swiss modernism seems justified. The Swiss production reflected a wider identity crisis in post-war architecture, to which postmodernism was about to offer some of the most important ways out. Against this charged and uncertain background, the launch under von Moos’s editorship of the journal archithese, in 1971, was a key moment for Swiss architecture theory and criticism. As the official journal of the Verband freierwerbender Schweizer Architekten (VfSA, the Swiss Federation of Independent Architects), archithese was intended as not much more than a bulletin board for professional members. However, von Moos used this opportunity to build ‘a platform to write critically and historically about contemporary problems in architecture’.2 Informed by his art-historical background, the agenda represented a stance detached from practice yet intent on addressing it. The first issues of archithese concentrated on wider societal and cultural concerns rather than self-referential formal and

material systems, a policy extending architectural critique beyond artefacts to environments: Is there a need for a new magazine of architecture? We think so. There are too few people who are interested in problems of the environment and perhaps because of this, the quality of life deteriorates day by day. Official planning policies are often questionable; concrete improvements end up as isolated, singular solutions. archithese would like to offer its contribution in analysing this situation and documenting it critically.3 In this vein archithese initiated discussions on housing, urbanism and the status of architecture, inviting, besides architects, contributions from philosophers, historians and sociologists. During von Moos’s editorship until 1980 and that of his successor, Martin Steinmann, until 1986, the journal maintained this critical stance, earning its place among the ‘radical little magazines’ that globally contributed to the significant theoretical shifts of the period.4 Its examination of international discussions around type and image, historical city centres and commercial peripheries, and the series of cultural transfers it traced between Switzerland and Italy, France and the United States proved particularly fruitful, raising the critical awareness of Swiss practitioners, informing and influencing their production for years to come. At the same time, archithese’s unconventional and uncompromising approach caused frictions with professional sponsors, leading to commercial precariousness, shake-ups of the editorial team and a short-lived merger with the architecture journal Werk between 1977 and 1979. In the Swiss context, archithese’s theoretical discourse and its impact on the built production puts a positive spin on Tafuri’s otherwise problematic notion of ‘operative criticism’.5 Von Moos encouraged architects to engage with history as a shared cultural reservoir, which could resonate with the wider public more than the self-willed forms admired by connoisseurs alone. Under Steinmann’s subsequent editorship, from 1980 to 1986, the journal set out to provide a historical and theoretical armature for the design-orientated aspects of the profession. Thematic issues dedicated to materials or construction techniques, interviews and round tables challenged practising architects to articulate their intellectual positions. While both editorial strategies proved relevant for the built production, they differed in one essential aspect. The former opened architectural production towards the wider culture, framing it, while the second folded it upon itself, emphasizing those instruments of expression – spatial, formal, material, technical – particular to built architecture. In this respect, archithese mirrored the debates around architectural autonomy that engulfed 1970s theory in Switzerland as much as in the United States or Italy.

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While Charles Jencks’s frequent presence in the early issues of archithese could suggest a local interest in the emerging theoretical basis of postmodernism, the coverage of Italian neo-rationalism and American popular iconography had the more lasting impact.6 Set up while von Moos lived in Rome,7 the journal whetted the Northern Swiss appetite for Italian ideas. This theoretical import was significantly strengthened by Aldo Rossi’s presence at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) from 1972 to 1974, a tenure whose importance for the Swiss discourse cannot be underestimated.8 Following the local assimilation of Rossi’s typological discourse, Venturi and Scott Brown, whom archithese had introduced to a Swiss audience before Learning from Las Vegas was translated into German, became the next big news. Their studies of US popular culture echoed the local preoccupation with bourgeois value systems, and provided a fresh range of critical and design tools. Archithese, therefore, could be seen as having imported to Switzerland the theoretical armature of at least two shades of postmodernism, in its Italian/ Rossian and American/Venturian guises. This discourse later formed a basis for built work, heralding genuinely ‘new directions’ in the Swiss architecture of the 1980s and beyond. Despite sharing the cultural and theoretical context of international postmodernism, Swiss architecture remained rather closed to its formal vocabulary. After a brief period of experimentation with the typological and morphological repertoire of stylized classicism – imported from Italy rather than America – the architects and public eventually rejected it as being out of place, certainly in German-speaking regions.9 Rather, archithese was instrumental in the articulation of a theoretical framework for a Swiss architecture characterized by its ‘unbroken intimacy with the Modern Movement’.10 This continuity was by no means straightforward, since modernism was treated as a local vernacular, in addition to the actual regional forms, materials and types. The quotation of such existing forms into new designs, whether in an abstracted, distorted or fragmented manner, is a typically postmodernist technique. And yet, in the historical and cultural conditions specific to Swiss architecture, avant-garde modernism maintained its relevance, rendering postmodernist developments as superfluous. It is only nowadays, as postmodernism is itself being historicized, that its effect is explicitly discussed in relation to the more recent Swiss production. Swiss architecture’s awkward relation to postmodernism can be clarified through examining a number of archithese issues from the mid- and late 1970s, in which important protagonists of the postmodern discourse are featured, paradoxically perhaps, under the sign of Realism. A leitmotif of the archithese discourse, the polyvalent notion of Realism was used to articulate a growing interest in architectures that derived their meaning from intelligible, communicative forms. While this is ostensibly a concern of postmodernism, the

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advocacy of everyday ordinary architectures as sources of inspiration and the attempt to engage with high and low cultures was presented in the Swiss context as essentially Realist.

Excursus on Realism A complex philosophical term related to the infinite ways in which we understand what is real, Realism can be most summarily defined in opposition to the abstract realm of ideas and perceptions. Kant contrasted it to idealism, distinguishing between transcendental and empirical versions of Realism in relation to reality as it exists ‘out there’ and the way it is perceived in our minds. The (Kantian) empirical realist maintains a correlation between reality and our understanding of it in space and time, whereas for the transcendental realist, these terms are wholly independent of each other.11 Realism and anti-Realism remain, however, relative rather than absolute: vectors pointing in opposing directions, on a sliding scale between how we perceive things and how they are. In literature and art, the meaning of Realism is fortunately somewhat steadier. In general, it refers to the long-established, recurring strategy of depicting aspects of life as truthfully and precisely as possible, without deliberate recourse to artifice, stylization or artistic licence. The direct manner of representation is reflected in the avoidance of implausible, bombastic or phantasmagorical subject matter. As art-historical Realism defines itself through the rejection of idealized or glorified representations, it tends to emphasize the ugly, the humble or the ordinary: a position that has historically taken political or ideological colouring. The historical art movement was anchored in nineteenth-century literature and painting, especially in France, where it dominated art production between the 1840s and the 1870s. For art historian Linda Nochlin, nineteenth-century Realism sought to provide ‘a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on the meticulous observation of contemporary life’.12 From the outset, the problematic of this proposition derives from the difficulty of dissociating oneself from one’s situation: the impossibility of attaining objectivity through perception. Nineteenth-century Realism went beyond mere verisimilitude as, in their search for a ‘styleless style’, artists focused on factual aspects of reality, on particular moments recorded in every detail, at the expense of narratives or commentary. What was lost in terms of emotional or temporal range was gained in experiential terms, rendering any aspect of human existence, no matter how mundane, as worthy and freely available subject matter.13 During the twentieth century, the social impetus of Realist art took over its aesthetic dimension. Bruno Reichlin defined the post-war Neo-Realism in Italian cinema and literature as ‘a surgical examination of matters of society, an almost

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documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals’.14 Over a hundred years, Realism had become the vehicle for varied, even conflicting ideological programmes, in architecture as well as art. The Neues Bauen turn towards the conditions of architectural production challenged architects to engage with ‘the reality of the building site’. Despite its utopian dimensions, Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolis could be argued to have skirted Realism in its determination of urban form purely through technological and economic factors. The opposite of avant-garde experimentation, Socialist Realism made recourse to the highly charged symbolism of historical monumental forms (using infinite perspectives to much the same effect as Hilberseimer). In postwar architecture, the Scandinavian New Empiricism put forth a form of Realism concerned with tactile materiality, formal variation, human scale and vernacular forms. The architectural production associated with Italian Neo-Realism adhered to Realism on two levels, constructional (using a didactic, readable tectonic as a mode of expression) and figurative (through the adoption of vernacular materials, decorative patterns and details).15 By 1975, when archithese brought a discussion of Realism back to the table, the notion was charged with historical significance and the potential to extract modernism from its crisis. Around the mid-1970s, in a quick succession, archithese produced two issues on the topic of Realism. Number 13 (1975), entitled Las Vegas etc. oder, Realismus in der Architektur (Las Vegas etc., or, Realism in Architecture), concentrated on the research of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown. Eighteen months later, issue 19 (1976), Realismus in der Architektur (Realism in Architecture), pondered a wider ideological framework for Realism in relation to architectural practice. A number of other issues dealt with Realism implicitly rather than in name. For von Moos, Realism also meant ‘re-calibrating architectural modernity by abandoning the exclusive focus on the tradition of the avant-garde’, which explains the choice of themes like ‘Historicism’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Built Heritage Preservation’.16 In the Werk - archithese period, two issues on the topic of Monotony continued to address the concerns of the earlier Realism issues. Following the editorial change in 1980, Martin Steinmann continued exploring more marginal figures of twentieth-century modernism, who in maintaining a connection to tradition constituted valuable models for contemporaneous architecture: Hans Bernoulli, Franz Scheibler, Kay Fisker. All of these issues manifested a need to survey and reflect, not only on the ‘state of things’ in architecture and theory, but also on the cultural landscape of capitalist economies in the twentieth century. While this context raises inevitable parallels to the postmodern discourse, there remain considerable differences between it and archithese’s interest in Realism. The paradox of this situation became clear in the 1980s with the emergence of a new generation of Swiss architects, whose work, while shaped by Realist concerns, was clearly indebted to the techniques and conceptual framework of postmodernism.

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Las Vegas etc.: Realism as ideological framework The cover of archithese’s first Realism issue, edited by Stanislaus von Moos, superimposed ‘shock’ advertising graphics over a pink, monochrome rendering of Venturi and Rauch’s Guild House (Figure 5.1). The juxtaposition pointed to the import of Pop Art into Venturi and Scott Brown’s own work, which was thus rendered as a commodity.17 Despite the cover’s thematic clarity, the table of contents betrayed an unresolved dichotomy along ‘New World versus Old World’ lines: an extended article and interview on the work of Venturi and Scott Brown provided the US perspective, whereby three other articles (co-edited with Jacques Gubler) examined the historical relations between forms of communal living and ideological frameworks in Europe.18 Typical of archithese, these articles’ interest in formal productions informed by vernacular rather than progressive technological motifs complemented in spirit Venturi and Scott Brown’s concerns. Von Moos’s editorial formulated this amalgamation of American capitalist consumer culture and European housing history as an unresolved paradox, characteristic of modern architecture at the close of its grand narratives. In an inversion from the situation of the 1920s, fifty years later avant-garde modernism had become an instrument of post-war capitalist development, whereas the vernacular aesthetic of previously reactionary Heimat movements was seized as a radical alternative. This reversal indicated that the progressive imagery of modernism now served corporate interests through the production of ‘heroic’ offices and residential condominiums, whereas small-scale, suburban, populist initiatives associated before the war with nostalgic and reactionary policies had become in certain developed countries, the United States included, the surest means to provide adequate housing for the lower classes.19 This paradox set the scene, in von Moos’s introductory essay ‘Las Vegas etc.’, for the attempt to adapt Venturi and Scott Brown’s research to the concerns of the Swiss audience. The author proposed that adjustments to existing situations, the constraints of private interests and city conservation, should be accepted as preconditions for a socially engaged architecture.20 The interview with the protagonists developed along the same lines, addressing the historical reversal of the politically progressive and reactionary in the post-war capitalist system. ‘The revolution is now old; it has switched to the establishment’s side’, quipped Scott Brown.21 ‘Our ideas are based on an interest in social improvement … our let’s say neo-populist position is in the American context more of a left-wing position … But as soon as you begin to seek means to approach yourself to reality, you will discover that you must work with the existing system – or give up and build utopias’.22 For Scott Brown, Realist architecture acknowledged the impact of existing conditions, giving them formal expression rather than suppressing

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FIGURE 5.1 archithese 13 (1975), Las Vegas etc., oder Realismus in der Architektur. Cover showing Venturi and Rauch’s Guild House, Philadelphia, 1960–1963. Source: archithese / Niggli Publishers.

them. Adjustment was the default mode of contemporaneous practice. Realism as opposed to Utopia provided a non-judgemental record of existing environments, collecting observations and using them in design. The version of Realism proposed in this archithese issue was similar to Nochlin’s definition of the art historical notion: a truthful representation of contemporary

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life based on scrupulous, objective observation. A Realist architect would ‘look at existing cities as they are and […] try to understand why they are like that, without seeking to impose aesthetic or moral imperatives’.23 And yet, the record of the world ‘as is’ did not imply the architects’ accord with it. ‘Laughing in order not to cry’, the title of the interview, used irony as a distancing device from the problematic reality. In this, Venturi and Scott Brown’s attitude was closer to Pop Art than to nineteenth-century Realism, whose apparent objectivity had often concealed a partisan commentary on everyday social contrasts and dramatic historical events. Nochlin wrote that ‘for the Realist, [reality itself] cannot be universalized; it is bound to a concrete situation at a concrete moment in time’.24 By contrast, Venturi and Scott Brown’s irony was not moment-specific: it responded to the lack of ideological content and potential generalization of postwar capitalism. The version of Realism proposed in the first instance by the Las Vegas issue of archithese could be seen as a curious and benevolent look at reality. This attitude aimed to reconnect architecture to the bourgeois cultural values it had violently sought to reject in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only would this stance help recover an important source material for architectural production, but it would also render architecture itself, once more, both socially acceptable and politically possible. At the same time, the sole focus on Venturi and Scott Brown’s interpretation of Realism and the lack of resolution with other potential Realisms – including those chronologically more remote and culturally more closely identifiable in Europe – demanded a more wide-ranging examination.

Realismus in der Architektur: The dialectic of Realism In 1976, archithese returned to the theme with a programmatically ambitious, systematic collection of essays presenting Realism as a tool for the ‘critical revision of the notion itself of architecture’, seeking to shift emphasis from architecture’s place within cultural and social structures back to tendencies within the discipline itself (Figure 5.2).25 Despite their range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, the contributing architects, historians and philosophers all agreed on the dialectic nature of architectural Realism, manifested as the tension between aesthetic and functional attributes of the discipline. This second issue on Realism was co-edited by Martin Steinmann and Bruno Reichlin, architects trained at ETH during the 1960s, who belonged to a politically active generation that closely followed the debates of Italian neo-rationalism. Bruno Reichlin and his partner in practice, Fabio Reinhart, had initiated Aldo Rossi’s

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FIGURE 5.2 archithese 19 (1976), Realismus in der Architektur. Cover with model by Giorgio Grassi. Source: archithese / Niggli Publishers.

appointment as visiting professor at ETH and had been his teaching assistants between 1972 and 1974, also taking part in the Fifteenth Triennial in Milan in 1973. Martin Steinmann, a frequent contributor to archithese since its early days, had curated the exhibition Tendenzen – Neuere Architektur im Tessin at ETH in November to December 1975, an event that had sharply brought the recent Ticinese Rationalism to the attention of German Swiss architects. As K. Michael Hays would

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later note, rather than framing Ticinese architecture as a regional variant of late modernism, Steinmann conceptualized its autonomy, linking it to the emerging debate on architectural Realism.26 Steinmann and Reichlin’s editorial ‘Zum Problem der innerarchitektonischen Wirklichkeit’ (On the Inherent Reality of Architecture) reprised the same argument.27 In the vein of Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács, they rejected a purely ideological or purely functional Realism, asking to acknowledge instead Realism’s aesthetic and rhetoric dimensions. Rossi’s interest in formal typological analogy and Venturi’s populist appreciation of ordinary environments were both significant strategies for this understanding of Realism. The inherent reality of architecture was, partly, its own history; thus tradition could guarantee the connection between individual creativity and the surrounding culture, as suggested by Rossi’s hermetic formulation ‘L’architettura sono le architetture’ (The architecture are the architectures). Steinmann and Reichlin grounded architectural production in readings of reality – cultural baggage, rules, habits and customs derived from personal and collective experiences – establishing an ideological connection not only with the Italian Tendenza, but also with contemporaneous discourses on semiology and structuralism. And yet the inherent reality of architecture, Steinmann and Reichlin argued, depended on an empirical understanding, its ultimate aim being its construction and experience in a material sense.28 If, for the editors, architecture could reflect social reality while enjoying its own sensuous and intellectual nature, other contributions to the debate adhered to this dialectical understanding of architectural Realism. Alan Colquhoun’s essay ‘Rules, Realism, History’ examined the tension between architecture as ‘selfreferential system’ with its own traditions and value systems, and as a ‘social product’, shaped by wider social and economic circumstances, warning against the excessively intellectualized approach of ‘purely self-reflective architecture’ (of which he cited Rossi’s Gallaratese as an example). Colquhoun proposed to rephrase the dichotomy as a ‘dialectical process, in which aesthetic norms are modified by external forces to achieve a partial synthesis’.29 Giorgio Grassi’s piece ‘Architekturprobleme und Realismus’ (Architecture Problems and Realism) reprised Lukács’s description of the architectural work, or element, as simultaneously fulfilling a function and expressing this function symbolically. This theoretical reassessment was rounded up by the art-historical perspectives of Hans Heinz Holz and Otakar Mácel, reaching a similar conclusion to Grassi’s and Colquhoun’s: that Realism as a stylistic concept resided in the alignment of architecture’s subjective and objective attributes. Meanwhile, Rossi’s ‘Une éducation realiste’ (A Realist Education) struck a more tentative tone, stating that ‘Realism’ as an architectural category was only of interest inasmuch as architecture could produce, with its relatively limited means, genuine emotion. Above all, he resisted the idea of Realism as an abstraction of reality: it is idiotic to make an architectural category of Realism. If one does, then it will have the same fate as rationalism, as symmetry, and so many other things that

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are only useful insofar as they express ideas … Is Realism only pedagogical and didactic? Certainly not. And it is certain that it isn’t academic either, because Realism eludes academies, doctoral theses, professors and students, thanks to its incredible, marvellous vitality, or simply its ‘reality’.30 Scott Brown’s contribution, showing material from the exhibition Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, was likewise shy of addressing Realism by name.31 If anything, it was implied in the pursuit of symbolic meaning in familiar and ubiquitous built forms which could offer the ‘man in the street’ a sense of orientation and belonging. As Deborah Fausch would note elsewhere, Venturi and Scott Brown characterized their investigation of the new urban vernacular as a form of realism, and indeed, the tradition of nineteenth-century realist French literature and painting … lay behind their interest in the existing landscape … Realism [was] the most appropriate stance to take towards the forms of the everyday world of postwar America. But their revolutionary realism existed in uneasy combination with a sensibility of bemused detachment inherited from [Pop aesthetic].32 Both Rossi’s existential listlessness and Venturi and Scott Brown’s unedited reality sampling reinforced the need for a dialectic understanding of architectural Realism. Against the theoretical backdrop orchestrated by Steinmann and Reichlin, Rossi’s insistence on formal autonomy and Venturi’s inclusive anatomy of the everyday complemented each other. While neither completely overlooked the dialectic at play, the former emphasized the formal aspects of architecture, the latter its sociopolitical reality, projecting an understanding of Realism as a self-perpetuating dilemma.33

Nachkriegs-Generation, Schweizer Architekten unter 40: Return to form At the end of the merger with Werk, the first issue of the reformatted archithese to come out in 1980 announced a new editorial strategy, placing emphasis on buildings over theories.34 This agenda, which Steinmann as new editor-in-chief would implement for a number of years, illustrates a turn in the Swiss discourse towards the production of form. Poignantly, this first issue of the reborn archithese examined the protagonists of a new architectural generation, almost all of them born in the 1940s and trained at ETH in the 1960s. The strong presence of Italian- and German-speaking Swiss practices reflected Steinmann’s curatorship of the influential Tendenzen exhibition

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of 1975. In a similar vein, the study was limited to small works, mainly private houses by young practices. With the notable exception of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, then very recent names on the Swiss scene, the selection illustrated the transitional period preceding the ‘post-war architectural generation’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Herzog & de Meuron’s first built project, the Blue House in Oberwil, fitted the selection through its self-conscious interpretation of ‘ordinary’ architecture. Nevertheless, its painterly application of ‘Yves Klein blue’ on common breeze blocks was an embryonic gesture of the singularity and selfreferentiality that would became emblematic of their future career. As Steinmann explained, the term ‘post-war’ went beyond describing a historical period to circumscribe a shared cultural ground. These architects had grown up in 1940s and 1950s Switzerland, witnessing as children the effects of US cultural imports and, as students, the political and ideological backlash against the resulting hegemony of consumer values. In a perversion of the functionalist motifs articulated in the 1920s and 1930s, the generic projects of late modernism embodied this consumption culture, in anticipation of a worldwide order of capitalism. Its negation led to a new emphasis on the reality of place, in Switzerland as in Italy, Scandinavia or Britain. In other words, ‘Realism’ was once again claimed as a stable ground to which architecture could return in search for integrity and authenticity. This included not only the specificity of local cultures, but also that of architecture as an independent discipline, generating experiences that other media could not convey. Architecture’s dual nature was explored in Steinmann’s introductory essay entitled ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’. The author focused here on form, circumscribing an area of research through which architecture could be integrated in its place. Whilst the theory of the ‘ugly and ordinary architecture’ formulated in Learning from Las Vegas was his starting point, Steinmann was careful to separate its methodological applicability from formal replicability: The Venturis’ (sic) theory has been too strongly identified with the particular iconography they have studied. The important fact is that they have studied an iconography … Architects active in other countries, such as Switzerland, must draw from a different iconography in order to establish a harmonious accord with the place … They should find inspiration in typological and morphological characteristics different from those of Venturi.35 In relation to Swiss production, he distinguished two levels of ordinariness, which he called ‘simple’ and ‘ordinary’ architecture. The first consisted of the ‘straightforward application of architectural means to a given task, in the tradition both of the builders of the nineteenth century and the Neues Bauen of the twentieth’.36 ‘Simple’ architecture used conventional forms and construction techniques in order to arrive at a reasonable accord of usage, cost and architectural expression.

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The second, ‘ordinary’ only in name, comprised the quotation of common familiar typologies in order to recreate a sense of cultural belonging. If the raison d’être of the first was conceptually a continuation of modernist rationalism, the second operated as language, dealing with the cultural significance of built artefacts. The two categories were further distinguished through the types on which they were modelled. If ‘simple’ architecture replicated utilitarian buildings such as sheds, seeking to replicate their instrumental ‘unity of technical means, form and use, like a tool’, ‘ordinary’ architecture also adopted the language of representational buildings, such as ‘nineteenth-century suburban or immigrants’ villas’, seeking decorum as well as utility.37 Despite the different intent, stylistically the simple and ordinary architectures were not necessarily dissimilar. When Michael Alder, the Basel-based architect emblematic of the ‘simple’ variant, called for a return to ‘elementary architecture’, he did so by taking modest and familiar typologies as models for design, much like Reichlin and Reinhart with their house in Vezio. Both projects were recognizably ‘shed-’ or ‘house-like’, combining elements like triangular pediments, covered verandas, pitched roofs and overhanging eaves in a common search for cultural intelligibility. If anything, “ordinary” architecture distinguished itself from its surroundings precisely through those compositional procedures that rendered it less ordinary. Discreet manipulations of form and scale, or the unconventional juxtaposition of conventional elements, were sought to create a sense of estrangement and differentiation. Venturi and Scott Brown’s Nantucket Island houses were a precedent for this strategy, using popular motifs lifted from pattern catalogues so as to signal that their ‘ordinary character was intentionally “manufactured”’.38 This critical distancing from the model was not easy to maintain in the Swiss context, where it was less clear how close the ‘ordinary’ could get to the actual ordinary without losing its inverted commas. Silvano Caccia’s villa at Borgo Lugonese was particularly hard to distinguish from its model, and Aurelio Galfetti’s house at Dagro copied an old existing house to the extent that it became ‘entirely a quote’. In this case, the difference between historical pastiche and deliberate renouncement of architectural authorship had to be articulated verbally rather than readable into the buildings themselves. It was only through their intentions that these projects were distinguished from a more problematic ‘new historicism’.39 Conspicuously absent from these reflections was the discussion of political imperatives in the determination of forms, such as those arising from normative planning requirements or from negotiations with clients’ tastes. Since such considerations had been discussed lengthily but inconclusively in the late 1960s and 1970s (cue archithese’s earlier Realism issues), this might have been a manifest retreat into the graspable domain of the ‘intra-architectural’.40 However, in the context of ‘ordinary’ architecture, this autonomous proposition was even more paradoxical than usual. While forms from the general culture were deployed

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in order to relieve architects from the task of inventing new forms, thus freeing architecture from one modernist imperative, the emphasis on autonomy reinforced a different modernist projection: the re-establishment of the architect, despite all evidence to the contrary, as sole creative authority.

Realism – a Swiss postmodernism? Archithese’s discussions on Realism opened a wide interpretative range, between von Moos’s openness towards the external conditioning of architecture (albeit in an ironic and detached manner) and Steinmann’s insistence on the concrete reality of architectural forms (albeit drawing meaning from a wider cultural reservoir). The intermediate position of the 1976 Realism issue, drawing on a variety of sources to articulate its theme dialectically, seems to have come closest to the heart of the matter. As K. Michael Hays has noted, Realism is characterized by the overlap of two contradictory claims, one aesthetic and one epistemological. The aesthetic claim tends to mark off the work from everyday life, isolating it in a realm of heightened aesthetic intensity where concepts such as style, typology, and technique are understood self-consciously, synchronically, and reflexively – a realm almost unmediated by circumstance. The epistemological claim, on the other hand, operates to bind the work to the real itself, to situate it in a historically specific context and value the work for the knowledge it affords of a particular reality rather than for its autonomy and mobility.41 As archithese editor between 1980 and 1986, Steinmann ‘continued to develop his characterization of Realism … in essays that linked the sober rationalism of Rossi, the populism of Venturi, and the new architecture of Switzerland’.42 In this way, the archithese discourse brought the epistemological and aesthetic poles of the Realist debate into built architecture. Steinmann’s ambition to formulate a coherent theoretical discourse for the Swiss production showed significant results in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of practitioners featured in the journal were establishing themselves on the national and international scene. At this time Swiss discourse had broken free of the tentative quotations of classical forms, more visible in the Ticino where their cultural relevance had been more pronounced, to effect a return to tangible coordinates: the local construction culture with its language of simple, ‘real’ materials, and the modernist heritage integrated as a kind of local vernacular. Gradually, under the growing imperative of formal unity, precise references came to be subsumed under the aesthetic category of physical ‘presence’:43

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One finds a tendency in contemporary architecture to conceive buildings as simple, clear bodies, volumes whose simplicity bestows a great significance on form, material, colour, independently of any reference to other buildings. These projects wear no longer the mask of imported forms, aimed at hiding that they lack a face of their own.44 These ‘masks’ – split pediments, plywood columns and cardboard architraves spring to mind – were the manifestations of signs and symbols that postmodernism had rendered visible, in an often absurd scenography of form without materiality and weight. This movement of reification was, however, by no means conclusive. The austere and abstract forms of Swiss minimalism proved as consumable a paradigm as the postmodern historicism they superseded. Their import into the mainstream and dilution through repetition ensured that their ideological charge, too, faded. Centred on the dialogue with history and the open communication of its historicity, postmodernism largely circumscribed the same theoretical field as Realist research. Charles Jencks identified in postmodern architecture a nonjudgemental attitude towards the world ‘as found’, willing to ‘include ugliness, decay, banality, austerity, without becoming depressing’.45 If this last proviso distinguished it from an earnest Neo-Realism, it also dictated its detachment from the imperfect reality. For the literary critic Matei Calinescu, postmodernism effected an inversion of the old avant-garde, ‘opting for a logic of renovation rather than radical innovation’ to engage ‘into a lively reconstructive dialogue with the old and the past’.46 But while Jencks worked towards its reification (into a historicist formal vocabulary most manifestly), Calinescu warned that postmodernism is just a mode of historical enquiry, ‘not a new name for a new “reality” or “mental structure”’.47 Its involvement with history implied a mediation with that which is already known, at the cost of losing its spontaneity and force of expression. Calinescu acknowledged this loss of ‘innocence’ by ascribing postmodernism characteristic attitudes of ‘irony, playfulness, parodic and selfparodic nostalgia’.48 (We recognize here Venturi and Scott Brown’s thoroughly postmodern contribution to the first archithese issue on Realism.) This mediation gave rise to an architecture of double codes, which for Jencks ‘seeks to speak on two levels at once: to a concerned minority of architects, an elite who recognize the subtle directions of a fast-changing language, and to the inhabitants, users, or passers-by, who want only to understand to enjoy it’.49 The double coding brings postmodernism closer to the concept of architectural Realism advanced in the second archithese issue, expressed by Lukács and Grassi as a tension between function and cultural meaning, and by Colquhoun as a partial synthesis between aesthetic and extra-architectural demands. An examination of archithese’s Realism issues highlights Swiss architecture’s troubled relationship to postmodernism, which it adopted as design method yet rejected as formal style. This convoluted cycle of revulsion and attraction is

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partly explained when we consider, with Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernism as a facet of modernism: ‘that which, in the modern … denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.’50 Under the apprehension that architecture might disappear under the claims exercised by its social role, the Swiss production of the 1980s and 1990s represented a call to order, reworking the propositions of 1960s and 1970s autonomy. Its longing for simplicity reacted against the proliferation of symbols and meanings, the cynical arbitrariness of postmodernist production. The ‘simple’ meanwhile is one of Lyotard’s ‘ideas of which no presentation is possible’, that ‘we cannot illustrate with a sensible object’.51 This is especially the case with buildings that, by virtue of their artistic ambition, can never be simply ‘simple’. In their attempt to present the non-presentable, both the abstract formalism and sensuous materiality of Swiss architecture were inescapably postmodern. In claiming the reality of form, material and construction but trying to suppress the reality of external conditions, this production propagated the inner contradictions of architectural Realism.

Notes 1 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘New Directions in Swiss Architecture?’, in Jul Bachmann and

Stanislaus von Moos, eds, New Directions in Swiss Architecture (New York: George Brazillier, 1969), 11–40 (11). 2 Beatriz Colomina and Marie Theres Stauffer, ‘Interview with Stanislaus von Moos.

Archithese Editor in Chief, 1970–80’, in Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley, eds, Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X (Barcelona, Basel, New York: Actar and Princeton University Press, 2010), 484. 3 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Editorial’, archithese 1 (1971), 1. 4 See Colomina and Buckley, Clip, Stamp, Fold. 5 Tafuri saw ‘operative criticism’ as instrumentalizing historical readings, so as to

place them in the service of current arguments and attitudes. See Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Operative Criticism’, in Theories and History of Architecture (London, Toronto, Sydney, New York: Granada, 1980), 141–163. 6 Jencks wrote four contributions for archithese between 1971 and 1974, including

‘Heutige Architektur und Zeitgeist’ (Contemporary Architecture and Zeitgeist) in archithese 2 (1971), 25–41, and ‘Rhetorik und Architektur’ (Architecture and Rhetoric) in archithese 2 (1972), 19–29. 7 Colomina and Stauffer, ‘Interview with Stanislaus von Moos’, 483. 8 For detailed accounts of his influence see Akos Moravanszky and Judith

Hopfengärtner, eds, Aldo Rossi und die Schweiz (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2011).

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9

An exception was the architecture of the Ticino, where such forms were culturally closer and more easily assimilated. Ticinese architecture dominated the Swiss architectural discourse in the 1970s and influenced the architecture of Germanspeaking Switzerland at the start of the 1980s.

10 Marcel Meili, ‘A Few Remarks Concerning Swiss-German Architecture’, a+u 309

(1996), 24. 11 Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995), 746. 12 Linda Nochlin, Realism. Style and Civilisation (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1971), 13. 13 Nochlin, Realism, 30–33. 14 Bruno Reichlin, ‘Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture’ (Part 1), in Grey Room

5 (Autumn 2001), 80. 15 See Bruno Reichlin, ‘Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture’ (Part 2), in Grey

Room 6 (Winter 2001), 111–113. In Part 1, published in the previous issue, Reichlin defines Italian Neo-Realism in cinema and literature as ‘a surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a moreor-less direct criticism of current society and morals’. 16 Stanislaus von Moos in correspondence with the author, 12 October 2015. 17 Venturi and Rauch, Guild House Friends’ Housing for the Elderly, Philadelphia,

1960–1963. 18 Dominique Gillard, ‘Le Quartier des Iris’, 33–38; Othmar Birkner, ‘Das soziale Grün

– Nutzgartenbewegung und Wohnreform’, 39–45; Vera Ziroff, ‘Vom Weissenhof zum Kochenhof ’, archithese 13 (1975), 46–54. 19 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Realism in Architecture’, archithese 13 (1975), 2–4. 20 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Las Vegas etc.’, archithese 13 (1975), 16. 21 ‘Lachen, um nicht zu weinen – Interview mit Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’,

archithese 13 (1975), 23. 22 ‘Lachen, um nicht zu weinen’, 20–21. 23 ‘Lachen, um nicht zu weinen’, 21. 24 Nochlin, Realism, 33. 25 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Realismus in der Architektur’, archithese 19 (1976), 2. 26 K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,

2000), 246. 27 See M. Steinmann, ‘Reality as History’, in Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968,

250–253. 28 Bruno Reichlin and Martin Steinmann, ‘Zum Problem der innerarchitektonischen

Wirklichkeit’, archithese 19 (1976), 10. 29 Alan Colquhoun, ‘Regeln, Realismus und Geschichte’, archithese 19 (1976), 12–17.

Original English text in Alan Colquhoun, ‘Rules, Realism, and History’, in Essays in

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Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 67, 74. 30 Aldo Rossi, ‘Une éducation réaliste. Realismus als Erziehung’, archithese 19 (1976),

25–26. Republished in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 190 (1977), 38. 31 Venturi and Rauch, Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, 26 February 1976–31

October 1976. Renwick Gallery, The Smithsonian, Washington, DC. 32 Deborah Fausch, ‘Ugly and Ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday’, in

Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, eds, Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 94–95. 33 This understanding was taken up in Bernard Huet’s ‘Formalisme – Réalisme’ issue

of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 190 (1977), which republished in translation the contributions of Steinmann and Reichlin, Grassi and Rossi. Grassi’s piece was later republished in an English expanded version entitled ‘Avant-Garde and Continuity’, Oppositions 21 (1980), 24–33. 34 Stanislaus von Moos, ‘40’, archithese 1 (1980), 2. 35 Martin Steinmann, ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’, archithese 1

(1980), 14. 36 Steinmann in correspondence with the author, 12 June 2015. 37 Steinmann, ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’, English summary, 3. 38 Steinmann, ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’, 11. 39 Steinmann, ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’, 12. 40 Steinmann, ‘Concerning “Simple” and “Ordinary” Architecture’, 12. 41 Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968, 254. 42 Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968, 246. 43 For a more detailed discussion of ‘presence’ and the aesthetic traits of Swiss

architecture at this time see Irina Davidovici, ‘ Towards a Swiss Model’, in Forms of Practice. German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2012), 213–225. 44 Martin Steinmann, ‘La Forme Forte. Für eine Architektur diesseits von Zeichnen’, in

Jacques Lucan and Bruno Marchand, eds, Forme Forte. Ecrits / Schriften 1972–2002 (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), 197. 45 Charles Jencks, ‘Post-Modern Architecture’, in The Language of Post-Modern

Architecture, republished in Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (First edition, London: Academy Editions, 1977), 309. 46 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987),

276. 47 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 279. 48 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 277. 49 Charles Jencks, Current Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1982), 111.

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50 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, in The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 81. 51 Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, 78.

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6 ALESSANDRO MENDINI, DOMUS AND THE POSTMODERN VISION (1979–1985) SILVIA MICHELI

In 1980s Italian architecture culture, the making of postmodern architecture was never a ‘question of style’, but was rather linked to architects’ individual paths, each with a different approach to the relationship between history and design. Moreover, the Italian postmodern architectural community was far from having a unanimous solution to the demise of modernist ideology. Rome, Venice and Milan were the most active laboratories of original and independent theoretical and design hypotheses and acted as three interconnected poles. For instance, the Romebased architect Paolo Portoghesi, curator of the famous 1980 First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale,1 was considered responsible for presenting international postmodern trends in Italy.2 Portoghesi elaborated a very personal and refined approach to design, underpinned by his historical studies on the Baroque. Through the use of ancient architectural examples and geometric formulae, he attempted to disentangle the dogma of modern architecture. Aldo Rossi, who in the 1970s was becoming a celebrity in American architectural circles, theorized a typological approach to history. His obsession for repetition and his technique of juxtaposing primary volumes resulted in the abstraction of the architectural project. In Milan, Studio Alchimia, led by Alessandro Mendini, and the Memphis group, founded by Ettore Sottsass, introduced a heterodox approach to postmodern design with the use of irony, ambiguity and hedonism within the project.

With its well-established publishing system, Milan played a crucial role in the dissemination of the different positions about Italian postmodern architecture discourse. In the 1980s Italian context, underpinned by the values of accumulation and acceleration, architecture magazines turned out to be the perfect vehicle for enhancing the circulation of ideas and framing the national architectural discussion. Intellectually less demanding than architectural books, which mushroomed in the 1960s and 1970s, and aesthetically more appealing with their numerous and colourful images, big titles and slim formats, architecture magazines better suited the necessities of the new dynamic postmodern lifestyle. By the end of the 1970s, the production and variety of Italian architecture journals was impressive. In this intellectually stimulating environment, the Milanese architecture journal Domus stood out not only as an active stage for the promotion of postmodern architecture but also as an experimental laboratory for the definition of new forms of design. Its distinctive approach to the production and presentation of postmodern ideas was supported by the understanding of design as a non-specialized and anti-industrial problem. This essay focuses on the key role played by Italian magazines, and Domus in particular, in the construction and promotion of postmodern architecture culture, in an attempt to illustrate the vital relationship between architecture and the architecture media. In particular, this essay explores Domus’s role in the diffusion of a militant postmodern vision animated by architects and designers who elaborated ‘postmodern projects’ instead of merely theorizing the idea of the postmodern or treating it stylistically. Attention will be paid to the responsibility of Mendini in transiting Domus into its ‘postmodern phase’, marked by a change of its graphics, critical approach, choice of topics and narrative.

Domus in Mendini’s postmodern trajectory Between 1979 and 1985, during the heyday of international postmodernism, Domus was directed by Milan-based architect and designer Alessandro Mendini, who had built his outstanding career as an editor working for journals such as Casabella and Modo. Aware of the international reputation and reach that Domus had built over decades, the journal held a special role in Mendini’s agenda: that of operating as an international showcase for new ways of conceiving architectural and industrial design. Described by the journalist Barbara Radice as ‘a catalyst of situations and supplier of doubts and energies, a sophisticated intellectual,’3 Mendini was able to turn Domus into one of the most interesting crossroads in postmodern culture, bringing about a shift in national and international thinking. Through Domus, Mendini introduced the hypothesis of the postmodern not as a trend but as a method of work to be applied to every design and architectural

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project. In so doing, he distanced himself – and with him his large group of collaborators – from a stylistic understanding of postmodern architecture, which was more typical of US and British architecture culture and received with reluctance by the majority of Italian architects. History was a central issue of the disciplinary discourse, but differently from the stylistic approach of the Americans, Mendini prized the experimentation of design methods that interpreted the historical material instead of re-proposing it formally. Mendini’s own method consisted in the use of history as a ‘store’ from which to pull out design inspirations ‘in a sensitive and not scientific way’.4 The path followed by Mendini was labyrinthine: an individual and romantic approach. While shaping a new Italian postmodern lifestyle, Mendini’s strategic use of Domus as both laboratory and megaphone contributed to reorient the architecture discourse towards the hedonistic, transgressive, narcissistic, excessive and formalist values of design and architecture emerging in post-industrial societies and opening it up to new formal possibilities and alignments. Yet more than this, as observed with admiration in the pages of The Architectural Review, Mendini had an active role in the making of European postmodern design, as Milan, from where he operated, was the world’s capital of industrial design, a place for cross-pollination of ideas and experimentation.5 Ultimately, he understood Domus as an extraordinary opportunity to successfully export the ‘made-in-Italy’ concept around the world – and Italian style with it. Domus promoted postmodern architecture, avoiding the celebration of its style and exalting its formal and structural strategies instead: the accumulation of signs, the eclectic assembly of forms, the crossing of different disciplinary boundaries and communication techniques. For Mendini, postmodern culture was inclusive of popular elements. For instance, Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica house was appreciated for the use of humble materials combined in unusual architectural solutions, whereas James Stirling’s Stuttgart Staatsgallerie was regarded as a masterpiece of assembly of different architectural elements. Mendini articulated a discourse based on understanding design culture as constituted of fragments, parts and details, devoting attention to the formalism of international architecture  – American in particular – as well as to the new products of European industrial design. And yet, architecture and industrial design were not the main focus of the journal. With articles dedicated to extramural topics such as objects, fashion, food, scenography, photography, music and art, Mendini and his editorial team attempted to critically present architecture embedded in the popular culture of its time – a move undermining the disciplinary specificity that characterized Italian architecture culture. This approach was evident from the innovative covers that Mendini carefully organized in order to convey the new concept of the journal. Mendini’s experience, gathered from his prior involvement in the publishing industry, certainly contributed to the success of his directorship of Domus. After graduating from the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic in 1959, his design vocation was strongly intertwined with Milanese publishing circles. Before

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directing Domus, he worked with other Italian architecture journals: Casabella, Global Tools and Modo.6 In the role of director of Casabella from 1970 to March 1976,7 Mendini engaged with the promotion of the intellectual and design agenda of the neo-avant-gardes, with attention to the Radical groups such as Archizoom, Superstudio, UFO and Sturm.8 In so doing, Mendini succeeded in turning the magazine into an instrument of criticism against the bourgeois establishment.9 As a consequence of his activity with Casabella, Mendini was involved in the publication of the two issues of Global Tools, reporting on the experimental system of workshops for individual creativity promoted by Andrea Branzi. In 1977, together with Valerio Castelli, Giovanni Cutolo and Franco Raggi, Mendini funded Modo: Rivista di cultura del progetto (Modo: Journal of the Culture of the Project),10 a publication supported through private funding and whose reach was restricted to a sophisticated Italian audience. Modo presented architecture, industrial design and art through an unconventional approach based on pop communication techniques, working as an incubator of ideas later deployed by Mendini in the redesign of Domus.11 It was in Modo that he instrumentalized kitsch in order to taint the purity of elitist discourse around modernism, providing a new approach from other architecture journals. As part of this strategy, Mendini presented, in 1978, his most controversial piece of furniture, the Proust chair: an ambiguous, kitsch hand-painted ready-made – a false eighteenth-century object.12 In Modo, he also experimented with the use of language and formats borrowed from popular weekly magazines.13 For instance, Modo’s editorial board included the journalist Paolo Carloni, who would provide a different critical perspective on the issues of the journal through the use of non-disciplinary interpretative categories and a non-technical language.14 From 1970 to 1985, Mendini had the unique chance of directing three architectural and design journals: respectively Casabella, Modo and Domus. He did so deliberately pursuing one project ‘by fragments’,15 giving voice to a plurality of experimental and original responses to postmodern architecture. Hence, the three journals, despite their different graphics, layouts, sponsorship and audiences, can be considered as the three consecutive steps of the construction of Mendini’s ‘postmodern project’. Given their international reputation – that of Casabella and Domus – Mendini had the extraordinary capacity to reach out to an international audience.

Shift: Towards a new Domus Mendini inherited the editorship of Domus from the Milan-based architect and designer Gio Ponti, considered as one of the linchpins of Milanese architecture culture. The handover of the journal occurred in July 1979,16 with a short editorial by the publisher Gianni Mazzocchi announcing his decision to involve Mendini as

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the journal’s new director. The choice of Mendini as Ponti’s successor over Cesare Casati, at that time deputy director of Domus, was a strategic decision made by Mazzocchi’s daughters, Giovanna and Maria Grazia, together with Ponti and Pierre Restany, the French art critic and co-founder of the New Realism. Mendini had great experience in publishing, was an internationally famous exponent of the younger generation of Italian designers and exhibited a high degree of intellectual freedom: all assets that gained him the esteem of those who were not necessarily aligned with his ideology. But Mendini was also a provocative designer. Last but not least was the fact that Mendini was appreciated for being an authentic Milanese, who knew his city’s culture very well, the functioning of its industrial system, its institutional networks and the expectation of its high society. For all these reasons, Ponti felt confident in personally transferring Domus’s leadership to him.17 Despite the fact that Mendini considered the tradition of the magazine crucial, in January 1980 he initiated a progressive transformation of its content and graphics. The new editorial staff included Studio Alchimia, Gian Mario Andreani, Stefano Casciani, Fulvio Irace, Ugo La Pietra, Marianne Lorenz, Maria Grazia Mazzocchi, Monique Mizrahil, Rosa Maria Rinaldi, Patrizia Scarzella and Ettore Sottsass.18 Lisa Licitra Ponti, Ponti’s daughter, represented the continuity between the old and the new editorial board and was appointed deputy director. She was accompanied by Pierre Restany, who was also kept on at the journal. The first step to take was to go beyond the period of ‘charismatic protection’ characteristic of Ponti’s directorship and adopt a new critical responsibility.19 The ‘shift’, so to speak, occurred with the collaboration between Restany and Sottstass, an alliance constituting a sort of intellectual exchange during the first period of Mendini’s directorship. The large format of the pages, the graphic experimentations of the covers, the focus on the everyday life, the interdisciplinary approach, the importance of the image in the communication of its contents20 and the international coverage were considered features to be maintained and enhanced in the new phase of the journal. In his first editorial, Mendini recognized the importance of maintaining the journal’s freedom from academic power, political parties, industry, institutions and art cliques.21 He also intended to increase the degree of correlation between art, architecture and industrial design. In this respect, objects, buildings and artworks were equally presented without any particular hierarchy. The heterogeneous materials published in Domus were presented through the exuberant and ironic graphic layout designed by Ettore Sottsass, whose witty pictorial approach gave a distinctive look to the journal. Sottsass was not new to the tasks of journal graphic layout and editing. In 1967–1968, together with his first wife Fernanda Pivano and Allen Ginsberg, he founded Pianeta Fresco, an underground counter-culture magazine that promoted the Beat culture.22 In the only two issues published, he experimented with the association of alternative themes – civil rights, love, non-violence, trips and new forms of social behaviour –

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with an exuberant, even psychedelic, graphic language. Cultivating pop cultural tastes, Domus’s contents and ideas were conveyed through communication techniques proper to lifestyle magazines, such as informal editorials, lounge conversations, photo-story interviews, cartoon-style columns and thematic forums – for example, Mendini’s letter-like editorials or the ‘Restanystory’, a monthly photo-story formed by a few black-and-white photos, in which the French critic Restany talked with a protagonist of the contemporary cultural scene or addressed a particular topic. Also, to indicate the sections dedicated to foreign architecture and furniture design, it was decided to use an ironic symbol repeated on top of the page. For instance, a surfboard indicated the special on Australian architecture. Despite Sottsass having left Domus in 1980 after founding the design collaborative Memphis, his graphics remained recognizable in a stylized denticulated edge that became the mark of the journal in those years. From 1984, the table of contents was complemented by the satirical cartoons of ‘Ironimus’, a pseudonym for the Viennese architect Gustav Peichl.23 In the same year, Domus was presented at the Piper, a very trendy disco in Rome. The idea was to introduce the architecture journal to a different audience, transforming the journal’s scheme (cover, editorial, articles), into a live spectacle animated by the overheated discussions of Mendini, Bruno Zevi, Achille Bonito Oliva and Restany.24 The initiative to present an architecture journal in a disco exemplifies Mendini’s canny strategy to use different registers of communication to convey postmodern architectural ideas to a broader public.

Reinventing the facade: Domus’s covers 1980–1985 A special feature of Mendini’s Domus was its set of innovative covers. During Ponti’s directorship, Domus’s covers were already carefully designed and retained a certain degree of autonomy. The relevance of the cover in the communication strategy of the journal was taken by Mendini to the next level. The importance given to the cover was stressed in the table of contents with a special descriptive caption, indicating the title and author of each issue’s ‘facade’. The theme of the facade – the core concept of the Strada Novissima at the 1980 First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale – was central to postmodern architectural discussion. In this sense, not just the content of the magazine, but its form mirrored some of the preoccupations of postmodern architecture. From the first covers with the faces of architects to the representation of interiors with models, artists and architects surrounded by objects to the appearance of fashion, Domus featured three groups of covers that marked the different stages of the thematic and critical evolution of the journal under Mendini’s directorship.

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The exuberant covers designed between 1980 and 1985 (issues 602–623) were an ecumenical attempt to introduce opposite fronts. The ‘family bestiary’, as Tomas Maldonado polemically called the cover series,25 gathered living architects involved in postmodern architecture discourse, such as Aldo Rossi (Figure 6.1), Frank O.

FIGURE 6.1 Domus 602 (January 1980), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved.

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Gehry, Philip Johnson (Figure 6.2), Tomas Maldonado, Peter Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Manfredo Tafuri, Charles Jencks and Morris Lapidus. Surprisingly, among them there was also Andrea Palladio, considered ‘a very important presence’ in Mendini’s intellectual storehouse.26 According to the multidisciplinary approach adopted by Mendini, the selection also comprised designers, including Michele De Lucchi, Ponti and Sottsass – who curiously and exceptionally appear on the same cover – and Enzo Mari; artists, such as Andy Warhol, Meret Oppenheim and Mario Merz; little-known people like Aladdin Moustafa, the Egyptian builder, and intellectuals like Giulio Carlo Argan and Nancy Richard. The first issue features Rossi’s photographic portrait on its cover.27 Rossi appears in a medium close-up against a neutral background, whose blue colour is set in contrast to the yellow of the architect’s shirt. Although there is no presence of his architecture, a short text implies that flipping through the pages of the issue, the reader would find the essay ‘L’Ephémère est eternel. Aldo Rossi a Venezia’ (The ephemeral is eternal. Aldo Rossi in Venice) written by Tafuri. This and the following covers are lush photographic portraits elaborated by the Dutch painter Emilie van Hees between January 1980 and December 1981. Through the technique of watercolour on photograph, the black-and-white pictures were turned into interpretative portraits, in which the architect would look at the reader straight in the eye. In this way, Mendini wished to establish empathy and, ironically, aimed to identify the existence of the individuals behind their works,28 shifting the reader’s interest from the buildings to their authors. The relevance given to the architects’ faces – and their artificial representation – was a sign of interest in the relationship between architecture and authorship, with Mendini fascinated by the concept of the ‘starchitect’, a category of architect that would indeed gain centrality during the postmodern period. The representation of architecture and industrial design – and related problems  – through the face of their authors was not new in the history of twentieth-century architecture journals and magazines. For instance, in the United States the magazine Time published with consistency the faces of the most influential architects. But in the covers in which Frank L. Wright (1938), Richard Neutra (1949), Eero Saarinen (1956), Le Corbusier (1961), Minoru Yamasaki (1963), Buckminster Fuller (1964) and Philip Johnson (1979) appeared, the background was an architectural project by the architects, which gave a hint of their distinctive work. Given the broad influence of the architects featured on contemporary architecture, they were introduced to the general public as heroes of the twentieth century.29 On the contrary, the covers of faces displayed by Domus implied a different strategy. If the editorials of issues 602 and 603 are still dissociated from their cover, in issue 604, dedicated to Californian architecture, Mendini’s editorial ‘Dear Frank Gehry’ is an attempt to interpret his work as an ‘action of hyperrealism’, and from then on the editorial concentrated on the work of those shown on the cover. Going through the list of the architects represented, Domus

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FIGURE 6.2 Domus 608 (July 1980), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved.

paraded its personal ‘protagonists’, shifting the reader’s interest from the buildings themselves to their authors and the set of problems that their method implied. Hence the choice of the architects depended not on their fame and influence but on the critical level of their intellectual and design work.30

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With issue 624, released in January 1982, Domus initiated a new cycle of twenty-four covers named ‘Interiors with figure’, designed by Alchimia in collaboration with the photographic studio Occhiomagico.31 In this set of issues, the cover played the role of a manifesto, laying out design ideas. The change of cover was to mark a revision of the structure of the journal, as the new section dedicated to furniture and industrial design gained relevance in terms of its centrality in the issue. The table of contents was thus subdivided into ‘architecture’, ‘furnishing/design’, ‘art’, ‘forum’ and a caption-like description of the cover image. In his editorial entitled ‘Furnishing as being’,32 Mendini expressed the aim to explore the relationship between people – with their problems and needs – and their homes, considering the emotional and sensorial implications. Differently from Ponti, who presented perfect houses understood as ‘models’, Mendini adopted a psychoanalytical approach as a means to explore the private realm. He also changed the editorials’ formula: from a letter dedicated to a particular character presented on the cover to a short note about an aspect of the house. The living room, the bathroom and other rooms of the house were reconsidered according to new social habits. Furniture was crucial in the arrangement of each room, being as ‘vital’ as water to fish or limbs to a body.33 The generous dimension of the colour photos attached to the articles transmitted the sense of the space of each interior. Attention was also paid to the materials, such as tiles and fabrics, used to produce ‘soft design’.34 With this focus on the ‘home’ (and not on the house), Mendini made more evident his postmodern shift on architecture. The attention paid to the social role of architecture typical of the 1970s was replaced by the individualistic attitude of postmodern society: from the house understood as a ‘collective and social problem’ to the house as a ‘self-representation’. The covers of the second series were the representation of interiors, featuring fashion models, artists and intellectuals wearing branded dresses in settings furbished with contemporary objects. Even the sculpted hairdos of the characters populating the cover images were the result of an artistic intention. At some point, architects and designers too made their appearance in the ‘Domus interiors’. Paolo Portoghesi, Emilio Ambasz, Richard Meier and Vittorio Gregotti, amongst others, were architects with a strong interest in design – and a passion for Art Nouveau. The central role given to furniture in each cover is reminiscent of the animist stories by the Milanese writer Alberto Savinio,35 one of Mendini’s favourite authors.36 According to Alchimia: The inhabitant is part of the interior furnishing. If clothes ‘furnish’ the body, then furniture can also be clothing. And these individuals, this furniture and these clothes-which-are-not-clothes come alive with feelings and emotions that modern architecture has forgotten and which the architecture of the future hopefully will consider.37

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The enigmatic cover of issue 630, published in September 1982, is an articulated ‘collage’ titled ‘The new living room’. The fashion model Natasha, who wears a Stefan Wewerka dress, stands on a floor decorated by Paola Navone and next to a table covered by Mendini’s tapestry ‘Kandissone’, with porcelains and cutlery designed by Ponti. This setting, like others to follow, constituted a parody of the advertising clichés characteristic of weekly magazines of the time. The interior hosts a rocking chair designed by Branzi for Memphis. On the table and under a glass protector, there is a plastic cooked green chicken, which is the focus of the scene. The plastic chicken indicates that the living area has lost one of its primary functions (to have lunch/dinner) while Natasha is indicating above with her index finger the possible solution – although the reader cannot see what she is pointing to. All the common elements of the living room (table, tablecloth, kitchenware, food and chair) are arranged in such a way to destabilize the traditional sense of the function of the room and suggest a possible new use for it (Figure 6.3). In order to introduce to the reader ‘such a delicate issue as the furnishing’, Mendini decided to expose himself publishing his own apartment, which is situated in a bourgeois building designed by Piero Portaluppi in Milan. The flat was not shown as a pure piece of architecture with some excellent examples of furniture – as it used to be in Ponti’s Domus – but rather an intimate refuge, full of objects and personal belongings, allowing for the representation of not only spaces for life, but also how life is led in those spaces.38 Mendini’s interior representations become thus photos characterized by popular taste. Co-founder of Archizoom Massimo Morozzi’s home was represented with his cat on a Gerrit Rietveld Red Blue Chair, flowers on a Sottsass marble table, roller-skates scattered on the floor, headphones abandoned on a Kartell plastic chair and the TV on.39 The painter Arduino Cantafora wrote a poetic description of his house, full of feelings and emotional observations: ‘My home is all for me … To see it grow day by day first in one’s dreams and then in reality, so that one seems to go mad with joy; to fill it with everything that gives it more and more the feelings of a home. We needn’t feel ridiculous if we cover ourselves with knick-knacks’.40 The internationally famous fashion designers Ottavio and Rosita Missoni opened their house showing the accumulation of colours, forms and materials of objects found along the way, often in street markets: memories that also inspired their own business.41 An article dedicated to Tim Street-Porter’s photographic analysis of different ways of living discusses the sociological and psychological implications of observing and describing interiors through the camera. From California to London and New York, the interiors investigated by Street-Porter were full of ornaments and everyday accessories, such as towels in the bathroom, toys for the kids on the kitchen table and an ashtray in the lounge.42 And then the house of the collector, the architect, the businessman: different owners and their different lifestyles to document the multiplicity of postmodern domestic environments. The concept

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FIGURE 6.3 Domus 630 (July 1982), cover. Courtesy Editoriale Domus S.p.A. All rights reserved.

of the house/apartment as a background for human life is fully depicted in ‘Festa in casa/Casa in festa’ (party in the house/celebrating house), where the deputy director of Domus Lisa Licitra Ponti photographed a party in her house in such a way that the physical space disappears in favour of an emotional space. Despite

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the great interest in the house as the crucial space for family life, Domus presented other forms of interior relevant to contemporary life: transatlantic liner (floating house), museum and gallery (houses of art), church (God’s house), office (house of work), the city (house of society), shop (house of objects), disco (house of dancers), restaurant (house of food).

Domus and the Milanese culture of excess Under Mendini’s direction, Domus became a real ‘centre of power’, articulating a system of cultural fronts, such as the Domus Academy and the design gallery Centrodomus43 to which the journal was directly connected. More broadly, the city of Milan offered a robust cultural infrastructure for architecture and industrial design that cannot be ignored: both the Milan Triennale44 and the Salone del Mobile (Milan’s Furniture Fair), were exceptional stages on which to intensify the postmodern message of transgression and individuality offered by Domus. Milan’s reputation as a capital of design was, at that time, at its very peak.45 The Milan Furniture Fair, first opened in 1961, was recognized as the official stage of international design, marking the shift from a Milanese design-orientated culture to the agenda of ‘Made-in-Italy’. During the ‘design week’, furniture companies and designers organized independent happenings outside the official venue of the fair – in their showrooms or in unusual spots in the city. Ephemeral installations and spectacular parties generated luxurious and dream-like atmospheres, turning Milan into one of the most exuberant cities in Europe. For instance, at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1982, the company Poltrona Frau celebrated its 70th anniversary with a midnight oysters and champagne party; the magazine Abitare rented a Luna park in the heart of the city46 while the furniture design group Memphis produced an event full of music, a confusion of young, attractive people and ladies and gentlemen of great prestige amid masses and masses of things.47 Milan was also a pulsating fashion centre,48 with its sophisticated brands and eccentric protagonists, such as Elio Fiorucci, fashion designer and founder of the Fiorucci label, and the hair stylist Aldo Coppola who, during the 1980s, became famous for his interaction with the world of art, journalism, publishing and television.49 The slogan released in 1987 for Amaro Ramazzotti, a Milanese liqueur, perfectly summarized the vibrant soul of the city: ‘Questa Milano da vivere, da sognare, da godere, questa Milano da bere ‘(This Milan to live, dream, enjoy, this Milan to drink).’50 Mendini and the new editorial board of Domus took their place in this urban and cultural spectacle. In 1976 Milan was the hotbed for the foundation of Studio Alchimia by Alessandro and Adriana Guerriero, a creative group for whom money was no object and the role of the client secondary. Studio Alchimia and Domus became schools for a young generation of designers and architects51 providing a new synergic

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experience. The more mature ideas tested within Alchimia and its close circles were then promoted in Domus. Alchimia rescued the protagonists of the radical scene after Mendini left his directorship of Casabella in 1975 and the radical movement lost its cohesiveness. As the name itself implies, Alchimia sought to activate a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation and combination of different arts in a new condition of freedom: ‘A non-traumatic revolution, a non-frontal clash, a soft earthquake, between structure and decoration, with color and sentiment’.52 Alchimia, which was a sort of loose agency which operated with global [planetario] ambitions, soon gathered those other designers who were attempting to provoke and undermine the established modernist approach to design, proposing a new language and method of work based on paradox, metaphor, excess, displacement, irony and patchwork.53 Among them there were Alessandro Mendini, Alessandro Guerriero, Ettore Sottsass, Bruno and Giorgio Gregori, Michele De Lucchi, Andrea Branzi, UFO, Paola Navone, Daniela Puppa, Anna Gili and Franco Raggi. Alchimia also boasted a net of international collaborators, including Hans Hollein, Charles Jencks, Yumiko Kobayashi, Robert Venturi, Stanley Tigerman, Arata Isozaki and Pierre Restany. According to Alchimia’s manifesto, design was a matter of experimentation and those possibilities generated by a lack of separation between disciplines: For Alchimia, one must not set out to do sculpture, architecture, painting, applied arts, theatre or what else. The project works ambiguously outside of itself, in a state of waste, of disciplinary, dimension and conceptual indifference: the project is only an exercise of drawing.54 Examples of these ambiguous interdisciplinary dialogues set up by Alchimia are the ‘Arredo vestitivo’ (Dress furniture, 1982) designed by Mendini, for which Fiorucci organized a parade in his Milanese showroom in Galleria Passarella; the performance L’abito sonoro (Sonorous garment, 1984) by Anna Gili and the musical video ‘Il video sono io’ (I am the video, 1983) by the Italian pop group Matia Bazar, whose colourful choreography was designed by Alchimia.55 In 1981 in Milan, Sottsass founded Memphis, a design collective parallel to Alchimia that involved, amongst others, De Lucchi, Gili, Hans Hollein, Shiro Kuramata, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanuso. Memphis’s production was characterized by an ironic approach to design and a fascination for surface decoration.56 Alchimia and Memphis had similar cultural references (cubism, Viennese Secession, Bauhaus and non-institutionalized cultures), shared a common eclectic attitude for the use of metaphors and symbols and did not show a particular interest in the utility of the object.57 With their inclusive attitude, enthusiasm for heterogeneous materials and curiosity for experimentation, the two groups offered alternative perspectives on design, introducing a high degree of freedom that felt like a liberation from the constrictions of the modern movement, attitudes directly proposed by Mendini in each issue of Domus. The transgression

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they brought was that the object should not be necessarily ‘useful’ but more that it should be ‘magic’. In no other postmodern architectural circle was the hedonistic dimension of the project stressed with such emphasis. In 1980, Studio Nizzoli designed the new Domus headquarters located on the outskirts of Milan. The white facade of the building, with its lateral rods that evoke a giant capital featuring Ionic spirals, created a contrast with the brick wall of the rear of the building, well representing the postmodern language and method that the architecture journal was encouraging.58 In October 1983, another event complemented the web cleverly built around Domus: the opening of the Domus Academy, a postgraduate school of design that aimed to capitalize on Milan’s designers as teachers. Andrea Branzi was appointed director of the academia, assisted by Mendini, Guerriero, Restany and Fabris, while teaching staff also included Sottsass and Mario Bellini.59 According to Branzi, the Domus Academy had to ‘endow Europe with a design school located in a geographic area (Milan and Italy) which possesses, more than any other, the requisites of a great tradition in this field, and all the necessary infrastructure belonging to a perfectly tested industrial territory’.60 A few months before the opening of the Domus Academy, during an official VIP dinner in New York, Mendini, Branzi, Restany and Maria Grazia Mazzocchi announced the school’s forthcoming courses in front of eminent guests such as John Hejduk, Robert A.M. Stern, James Wines and Massimo Vignelli, in order to catch international students from the United States and establish connections with New York-based designers.61 Some projects of students from the Domus Academy were published in Domus,62 showing the close relationship of these two cultural enterprises. Mendini’s directorship of Domus ceased abruptly, in August 1985, due to a disagreement with the publisher on different editorial and political positions.63 On the one hand, Mendini refused to transform the journal into a financial affair supported by dominant industrial design companies. This might appear as a paradox considering his great effort to introduce industrial design as part of the broader discourse on contemporary design. Yet Mendini had his ethical convictions about the necessity of creative freedom. A too invasive presence of industry in the ideological choices of the journal would have broken the balance that he had been able to set up during his previous five years of leadership. This shift would have indeed implied the transformation of the journal into an uncritical tool and the abandonment of the development of a cultural problematic, sacrificing the ideological autonomy of the editorial board.64 In Mendini’s words: ‘Domus was an intellectual fact, not a commercial fact!’65 On the other hand, Mendini’s participation in a round table organized by the PCI (Italian Communist Party) was not appreciated by the publisher Giovanna Mazzocchi.66 In return, Mendini observed that ‘the recent appearance in the publishing house of right wing ideas and methods has indeed isolated my journal, which quickly remains alone in a context that lacks encouragement of cultural research and social commitment’.67

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In the 1980s, Mendini sought to produce a vision of postmodern design while living in the moment and indulging the decade’s qualities of excess. He did so through different venues, one of which, probably the most powerful, was the directorship of the architecture journal Domus between 1979 and 1985. Through the international network of Domus, he was able to operate a change in the direction of design culture, offering a new approach to the making of the project. Beyond the professionalism that dominated post-war Italian building production, and the investment in theory that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, Mendini turned the attention of Domus’s audience towards popular culture, whose fragments were extracted and combined in non-conventional ways, generating familiar and at the same time idiosyncratic objects as well as buildings.68 Domus not only retained its function of taste-maker in Italy, but its role became operative, articulating a context in which new ideas, processes and design methods were discussed, elaborating the hedonistic fringe of postmodern architecture in such a way that it could reach out and flourish in the rest of the world.

Notes 1 See Léa-Catherine Szacka, Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture

Biennale (Venice: Marsilio, 2016). 2 Silvia Micheli in conversation with Alessandro Mendini and Atelier Mendini, Milan,

12 January 2016. 3 Barbara Radice, ed., Elogio del banale/Praise of the banal (Turino-Milan: Lo studio

forma-Alchymia, 1980), 6. 4 Silvia Micheli in conversation with Alessandro Mendini. 5 Jonathan Glancey, ‘Milan Maestri: Alessandro Mendini’, The Architectural Review

CLXXVI, 1053 (1 November 1984), 44–57; 50–52. 6 From 1965, Mendini was a member of the editorial staff of Casabella, working under

its director, Gian Antonio Bernasconi, and had the opportunity to collaborate with AG Fronzoni, a graphic designer celebrated for his minimalist design layouts. Angelo Giuseppe Fronzoni decided to treat his name as a brand, shortening his first name to A.G. and, finally, eliminating the two dots after the initial letters. For more information on his work, see Christian Aichner and Bernhard Kuchenbeiser, AG Fronzoni Designphilosophie (Baden: Lars Müller, 1996). 7 Chiara Baglione, Casabella 1928–2008 (Milan: Electa architettura, 2008), 326–453. 8 See the book that was published as a Casabella document: Paola Navone and Bruno

Orlandini, Architettura ‘radicale’ (Segrate: Milani, 1974). 9 Casabella was not the only Italian magazine present the works of the neo-avant-gardes

and support the counter-culture in the architectural context. Silvia Micheli, ‘Le riviste italiane di architettura: Il luogo logico del dibattito architettonico’, in Marco Biraghi et al., Italia 60/70: Una stagione dell’architettura (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2010), 124–138.

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10 Modo stopped in 2006. 11 Santa Alchimia, a movie by Marco Poma (Milan: Metamorphosi, 2010). http://www.

alchimiamilano.it/video/santa_alchimia.html [accessed 25 July 2015]. 12 Giampiero Bosoni, Fabrizio Confalonieri, Il paesaggio del design italiano, 1972–1988

(Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1988). 13 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Rubrica per Modo’ (1987), in Atelier Mendini digital archive/

writings/1987. www.ateliermendini.it [accessed 25 July 2015]. 14 From a conversation with Franco Raggi, Milan, 7 January 2016. 15 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Architettura banale’ (1979). http://www.ateliermendini.it/index.

php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=251&cntnt01detailtemplate= AnniDett&cntnt01lang=en_US&cntnt01returnid=191 [accessed 20 December 2017]. 16 28–78 Architettura: Cinquanta anni di architettura italiana dal 1928 al 1978, catalogue

of the exhibition organized at Palazzo delle Stelline, 28 March-13 May 1979 (Milan: Domus, 1979). 17 Mendini was invited to Ponti’s place for a sort of intimate ritual of the transfer of

leadership. The old Ponti was waiting for Mendini wrapped up in a blanket, in front of a little table with a bottle of champagne and two glasses: ‘I pass my Domus on you’, he said, and the conversation continued with utopias in architecture. Silvia Micheli in conversation with Alessandro Mendini. 18 See ‘Gruppi di lavoro’ in the online archive of the Atelier Mendini. http://www.

ateliermendini.it/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=17&cntnt 01lang=en_US&cntnt01returnid=62 [accessed 25 June 2015]. 19 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Gio Ponti 1891–1979’, Domus 599 (1979), 1. 20 Stefano Boeri, ‘Visionary Domus’, in Mario Occhiuto, ed., Visioni Italiane:

Architettura e design verso un ambiente sostenibile, exhibition catalogue, Domus 894 suppl. (2006), 6. 21 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Dear reader’, Domus 602 (1980), 1. 22 Pablo Echaurren and Claudia Salaris, Controcultura in Italia 1967–1977: Viaggi

nell’underground (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 102. 23 Luigi Spinelli, ‘Domus under Alessandro Mendini’, in Domus 1980–1984, Vol. 9 (Köln:

Taschen, 2009), 6. 24 ‘Domus: serata al Piper’, Domus 652 (1984), 63. 25 Tomas Maldonado, ‘Family bestiary’, Domus 613 (1981), 9–10. 26 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Dear Andrea Palladio’, Domus 609 (1980), 1. 27 Domus 602 (1980). 28 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Furnishing as being’, Domus 624 (1982), 1. 29 Gabriella Lo Ricco and Silvia Micheli, Lo spettacolo dell’architettura: Profilo

dell’archistar© (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003). 30 From April 2010 to March of the following year, when he again became director of

Domus, Mendini himself re-used the cover of faces. Nevertheless, this small group

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of cartoon-like faces did not have the same impact than the one produced for the original series. See Domus issues 935–945. 31 Occhiomagico was founded in 1971 by Giancarlo Maiocchi. http://www.

occhiomagico.com/home.php?idd=80&ida=82 [accessed 25 June 2015]. 32 Mendini, ‘Furnishing as being’. 33 Mendini, ‘Furnishing as being’, 32, 43. 34 Alessandro Mendini, ‘In praise of fabric’, Domus 626 (1982), 1. 35 Alberto Savinio, Tutta la vita (Milan: Adelphi, 1945). 36 Chiara Vanzetto, ‘Mendini, un geniale cleptomane’, Corriere della Sera (11 January

2015), 21. 37 Guia Sambonet, Alchimia (Turin: Allemandi, 1987), 14–15. 38 Boeri, ‘Visionary Domus’. 39 Massimo Morozzi, ‘Nomenclature for furnishing’, Domus 625 (1982), 32–35. 40 Arduino Cantafora, ‘Sweet smelling roses’, Domus 625 (1982), 36–37. 41 Domus interviews Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, ‘Home sweet home’, Domus 625

(1982), 44–45. 42 ‘Photos of interiors’, Domus 626 (1982), 43–46. 43 Alessandro Mendini, ‘Mendini sulla deformazione edonistico-industriale’,

L’architettura cronache e storia 12 (1985), 832. 44 See, for instance, the publication of the exhibition ‘Case da progettare’ curated by

Franco Raggi and Francesco Trabucco, Domus 645 (1983), 32–41. 45 John Duka, ‘At Milan show, Neo-modern is the new look’, The New York Times, 23

September 1982, C6. 46 Minnie Gastel, ‘Il salone in festa’, Domus 634 (1982), 50. 47 ‘Salone del mobile 1982’, Domus 211 (1982), 102–103. 48 Luca Pollini, Gli Ottanta: L’Italia tra visione e illusione (Milan: Bevivino, 2010),

318–321. 49 See Eve Babitz, Fiorucci: The Book (New York: Harlin Quist/Dial/Delacorte, 1980). 50 cri5tin4, ‘spot amaro ramazzotti 1987’ [video], YouTube (published 14 October 2006).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m8jnLuMEYA [accessed 25 July 2015]. 51 Marco Biraghi and Silvia Micheli, Storia dell’architettura italiana 1985–2015 (Turin:

Einaudi, 2013). 52 Eliana Maria Lorena et al., Santa Alchimia (2009), 38. http://www.alchimiamilano.it/

[accessed 25 July 2015]. 53 http://www.ateliermendini.it/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articlei

d=109&cntnt01detailtemplate=AnniDett&cntnt01lang=en_US&cntnt01pagelimit=5 &cntnt01returnid=165 [accessed 25 June 2015]. 54 Sambonet, Alchimia, 29.

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55 Mauro Sabbione, ‘Mauro Sabbione - Matia Bazar - Il video sono io - Tango

1983’ [video], YouTube (published 5 February 2011). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DwyzfrvZHrk [accessed 25 July 2015]. 56 Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Made in Italy’, W 39,9 (September 2010). 57 Rosa Maria Rinaldi, ‘Memphis and Alchimia: Differences and resemblances’, Domus

646 (1984), 52–57. 58 ‘Picturesque Postmodern’, Domus 631 (1982), Cover; 6–9. 59 ‘Marginalia: Domus Academy’, The Architectural Review CLXXII, 1029 (1 November

1982), 4. 60 Andrea Branzi, ‘Domus Academy’, Domus 633 (1982), 56. 61 ‘Domus Academy a New York’, Domus 641 (1983), 60. 62 James Wines, ‘Domus Academy: Public space design’, Domus 652 (1984), 50–51. See

also Andrea Branzi ‘Domus Academy: One year later’, Domus 655 (1984), 60–61. 63 Mendini’s name did not appear in the table of contents and his editorial did not

welcome readers as usual. Deputy director Lisa Licitra Ponti directed the journal until February 1986, when Mario Bellini was designated new director of Domus. See Luigi Spinelli, ‘Domus, an Italian story’, in Mario Occhiuto, ed., Visioni Italiane: Architettura e design verso un ambiente sostenibile, exhibition catalogue, Domus 894 suppl. (2006), 7–10. 64 ‘Mendini sulla deformazione edonistico-industriale’. 65 Silvia Micheli in conversation with Alessandro Mendini. 66 ‘Solidarietà a Mendini, dimissionario da Domus’, L’architettura cronache e storia

360 (1985), 672. http://www.ateliermendini.it/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,d etail,0&cntnt01articleid=239&cntnt01detailtemplate=AnniDett&cntnt01lang= en_US&cntnt01returnid=185 [accessed 20 December 2017]. The tension was so high that Mendini gave notice of his resignation from the pages of the architectural journal L’architettura – cronache e storia directed by Bruno Zevi. 67 ‘Solidarietà a Mendini, dimissionario da Domus’, 672. 68 From Alchimia’s manifesto (1984). http://www.ateliermendini.it/index.php?mact=Ne

ws,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=240&cntnt01detailtemplate=AnniDett&cntnt01 lang=en_US&cntnt01returnid=186 [accessed 20 December 2017].

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PART III

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTS AS THINKERS: BRIDGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

7 TRANSITION TO ‘DISCOURSE’: ARCHITECTURE THEORY IN POSTMODERN AUSTRALIA ANDREW LEACH

Among the roles assumed by architecture periodicals in Australia’s postmodern decades was that of collapsing the distance between the world and the Antipodes. By the end of the 1970s this distance was less palpable than it had ever been, with architects enjoying unprecedented mobility in their study and practice, but the work being undertaken at the centres of international architecture discourse was also itself more mobile than it had ever been: a matter less of buildings than books, in which privileged location was not about experience but an authority underpinned by institutional power. Considering as a matter of intentions the editorial projects of two Australian architecture journals, this essay reflects on the local effects in Australia of the increased status of discourse as a mode of architectural practice and thought separable from the production of buildings. It considers how these periodicals defined their positions within Australian architecture debate while serving as vehicles for the transmission of postmodern models and ideas. This concerns two problems in particular. The first: the identification of these journals, as postmodern projects, with the stylistic postmodernism that had, by the end of the 1970s, served up a firm challenge to the trajectory of architectural modernism. The second: the ‘tyranny of distance’, to invoke Geoffrey Blainey, and the weighty bagage one is prone to carrying by dint of working in the antipodes of the centre.1 This latter issue invokes an anxiety that has its own history – as a preconception and as a body of expressions – even if seeing the world as a series of centres and peripheries has long since lost credibility as a way of understanding

the workings of knowledge and practices. The question, therefore, is not how these journals functioned at the periphery (or on the margins, or at the edge) of international architecture discourse, but rather how they functioned within a sense each fostered that the centres of the architectural world were, decidedly, elsewhere. Our first case is the Melbourne-based Transition – a journal of architectural criticism, theory and history – which responded both to what its editors were observing in international architecture debate and to the local rise of postmodernism and architectural nationalism as prominently evidenced in the competition for the Australian Parliament Building (launched April 1979). It was founded as an independent vehicle for architectural critique in 1979 and published by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT, now RMIT University) from 1984 until its final issue in 2000. (These pages only treat the first, independent years.2) Our second case is not a journal as such, but rather an editorial experiment within Architecture Australia (AA), the long-running national journal of record and mouthpiece of what was, in those years, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA), edited across the 1980s by Tom Heath.3 Within the pages of AA, Heath dedicated an annual section of the magazine to ‘Discourse’, which ran each June from 1984 to 1989. The ‘Discourse’ issues function here, in part, as a weak response to Transition, which responds, in turn, to other provocations. Its pages evince a modicum of anxiety around what registers as a sense of seconddegree peripherality in relation to the explicit and self-consciously sharper uptake of an international theory moment by Transition – and an acknowledgement that the rise of discourse had started to track a shift in the nature of what took place in the nation’s architecture schools. It is tempting to cast Transition as a strong (or, at least, less diluted) interpretation of the role of the journal in postmodern architecture culture and AA as a weaker and less centred example. Both kinds of engagement, however, set up three closely related effects of the development of discourse in Australian architecture’s postmodern decades. These, namely, are the recalibration of the roles of criticism and theory in Australian architecture, through which discourse was allowed to develop with a degree of autonomy from architectural practice (as literary theory did in relation to writing); a fresh claim on the importance of the academy as the proper home of criticism and debate, which positioned publishing as a natural function of academic rather than professional culture, thereby constituting a basic shift from the late modern years; and the valuing of discursive activity as a form of activity in its own right, in which changes in architecture’s international publishing culture and the Australian university sector happily, if briefly, coincided to the benefit of those working in architecture theory and architecture history. While writers in these years turned to the wider world, they turned, too, to problems in Australian architecture and to Australian manifestations of those themes that had gained traction in the centres.

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In short, by looking at the way Transition and the ‘Discourse’ section of AA set processing these problems and themes this essay positions Australian contributions to architecture discourse in an international scene that was persistently read from a distance, irrespective of a heightened mobility that placed Australians in the world and brought the world to Australia with greater ease. What was at stake in the treatment of postmodern architecture and theory in these journals? How do the tactics employed, variously, by an initially independent venue and a thoroughly institutionalized vehicle negotiate an increased identification of architecture as such with architecture discourse – as a form of institutionalization or as a form of its resistance? In what sense did these journals participate in this crucial moment of architecture’s postmodernization?

From the margins to the mainstream The first, 24-page issue of Transition (July 1979) contained a modest three articles: Philip Drew writing on conceptual resonances between late modernism and historical mannerism; Jeff Turnbull on the theme of morality in the work of Charles Moore; and Swetik Korzeniewski publishing a design project called Kidsville (which he dedicated to C.G. Jung).4 If Transition was anti-monumental, its rhetorical counterpoint was J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia (1968), a major historical appraisal of its subject.5 Transition was named for the chapter of Freeland’s book accounting for the years in which the prevalence of both a popular modernism and a modern classicism made the post-war modernist ascendency seem anything but a sure thing. In 1979, the matter was that of ‘an identifiable Australian culture’ that had become increasingly possible with the rise of postmodernism and its pluralities. The question was how Australian architecture might step out from the ‘cultural shadows of the USA, Great Britain, some parts of Europe, and latterly, Japan’.6 The founding editors were Ian McDougall and Richard Munday: two relatively fresh graduates of RMIT, both having also studied at the University of Adelaide. Their inaugural editorial observed, rather myopically, that the ‘development of architecture in this country has been retarded because architects, both practicing and teaching, have not sufficiently debated or discussed their work with much candour or profundity, or in a manner that would be of use to others’.7 The magazine quickly embraced a much more visual attitude, publishing the documentation of buildings, exhibitions, competitions and various forms of architectural speculation, but in its first issues it was full of (sometimes difficult) writing. It was a vehicle, first, of debate and discussion, in which postmodernism in Australia and abroad – with its increasingly apparent victory in the profession, its clear ascendency in the academy – itself formed a subject in a postmodern mode.

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The first issues of Transition bring debate on postmodernism to bear upon Australia as a self-consciously localized problem. The editors’ self-appointed task (after Freeland) was to make sense of architecture’s situation in those periods of history that have ‘just passed’ and are ‘just passing’.8 And to make sense, therefore, of the postmodern as a mode of change rather than its consequence. The editorial of their second issue offers a telling record of this project’s initial reception: When backers were originally being sought for this magazine, one architect queried: ‘It won’t be Post-Modern will it?’ This was interesting because the work of his office then appeared to be moving in a direction that would have surprised him had he delved into the recent genealogy of its guiding lights. Post-Modernism, it appears, is better known of than known. Lack of familiarity with the subject is one reason, but to be au fait these days is not so simple. Much of the explanation and rhetoric has probably done more to confuse matters than to clarify them. This is understandable as Post-Modernism is only just now assuming a general discernible form, while much early polemic deliberately played quite a game, but it does run contrary to the reasonable view that explanations explain, and that the purpose of creating categories is to assist in the identification of family resemblances, and to enable comparisons to be made in a systematic fashion. In this case, resemblances are often not visual, and many architects have been surprised when informed that they had arrived, that they had been labelled Post-Modern.9 Transition identified, articulated and advanced a mode of postmodernism that was discursive and intellectual, concerning ideas rather than style, and the emergent importance of theoretical reflection, provocation and representation over professional manifestations of the intergenerational guard change. This second issue included an article by Jennifer Taylor called ‘Looking at the Sydney School’, which would shortly thereafter be turned into a book; and a survey piece on ‘Architectural Style in Brisbane’ by Graham de Gruchy. These were followed by two reviews. The first was of ‘An Exhibition by Four Melbourne Architects’, in which Cathy Peake, Philip Drew and Michael Anderson considered work by Peter Crone, Edmond and Corrigan, Greg Burgess and Norman Day – all key figures in Melbourne’s postmodern avant-garde. The second reviewed ‘9 Designs from Melbourne’ entered into the competition for the Australian Parliament House that was eventually won by Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorpe, then one of five finalists from the first stage of the competition. Melbourne firm and finalist Denton Corker Marshall was not included in the line-up, which instead included schemes by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon (design architect Tim Hurbrugh); McIntyre, McIntyre and Partners; Argroup (design architect Des Smith); Caufield and Krivanek (Shane Murray and Tony Dimase); Norman Day (Howard Raggatt); Brown, Patrick, Echberg; Morris and Pirrotta; Ermin Smrekar; and Edmond & Corrigan – a mixture

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of now nationally significant and obscure practices and practitioners. A book review concluded the editors’ response to their concerned sponsors, with Munday looking at C. Ray Smith’s wide-ranging Supermannerism (1977). Two letters offer their own accounts of the trajectory of postmodern architecture in response to Drew’s article in the first issue, one jointly written by Ivan Rijavec and Alan Ball, the other by Michael Jorgensen – writing from within, and for, the Transition community.10 The question of what postmodernism meant for Australia was made more poignant by the Australian Parliament House competition, and both were regular touchstones of the four issues that comprised the magazine’s first volume (spanning 1979–1980). The third of these issues presented two more unsuccessful Australian schemes for Parliament House (one by Swetik Korzeniewski, Paul Desney and Terry Dorrough, the other by Daryl Jackson) as well as a broad reflection on the nature of the project as a whole, ‘In Search of a National Symbol’ (John Rockey). Drew also returned with a more wide-ranging assessment of the trajectory of architectural postmodernism, offering a broad contemporary context to the Australian debates (and the anxieties naturally lying under their surface).11 But in general the journal’s scope quickly shifted across the early 1980s from being a critical response to the issues raised in its first editorial to serving as a clearinghouse of ambitious writing for an ambitious readership in the modes of architecture theory and a theorized architecture history. Several essays published in these issues helped to set the tone of Australian architectural historiography across the balance of the decade and into the 1990s: ‘The Romance and Illusion of the Architecture of High Technology’ by Michael Keniger; ‘Contemporary Architecture and the American Freestyle (1850–1930)’ by Conrad Hamann; ‘Design and Revolution: Paris – Moscow, 1900–1930’ by Terry Smith; ‘Architecture in Tasmania 1930–80’ by Jennifer Taylor – the list goes on, and the table of contents of these issues offer a fascinating record of a local academic scene coming into its own.12 Alongside these articles paper architecture was given room to move, and reviews of competitions, books and exhibitions were anything but perfunctory descriptions.13 Transition was unambiguously a product of the discourse and design culture cultivated at RMIT and imitated elsewhere in Australia. When it was revived as the school’s official mouthpiece in 1984 (having after 1981 slowed down to an annual appearance), the transfer was relatively seamless, even if it was clear that the initial project of Munday and McDougall – to understand the implications of the postmodern turn for Australian architecture and its discourse – had been traded for another: to situate Australian practice and writing in the world (Figure 7.1). An important device in this respect was the inclusion of a large number of interviews with key (international) figures of the day – this arguably a postmodern discursive genre perpetuating the postmodern paradox of the purported death

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FIGURE 7.1 Cover of the fourth issue of Transition (October 1980). Copyright Transition.

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of metanarrative experienced alongside the documentation of voices from the centre.14 Regularly drawing on opportunities afforded by the RAIA’s International Architects talks series, as well as the vast network of fellow travellers who could secure appointments with contemporary luminaries on their home turf, those interviews brought the voices of international critics and theoreticians to Australian ears even as they put Australian architecture in the minds of interlocutors. William Turnbull Jr had been interviewed in the third issue and the following number forecast the centrality interviews would enjoy in the issues to come. It documented conversations with the three keynote speakers at the 1980 national RAIA conference at Sydney, ‘The Pleasures of Architecture’, which has historiographically served as a landmark event in the history of Australia’s embrace of postmodern architecture and discourse.15 Michael Graves, George Baird and Rem Koolhaas each offered their thoughts on the issues, positions and relationships shaping architecture culture at that moment, acceding to the request by the Transition correspondents to give their first impressions of Australian architecture debate and their advice for those who sought to better connect it to the world. Consider the questions put to Michael Graves, which bluntly asked him to position himself in current American discourse. Does his work belong to ‘a tradition of scholasticism in American architecture’ or as part of ‘another wave of young turks?’ ‘Do you see yourself,’ they asked, ‘as still in the avant-garde?’ The questions worried over the relative merits of different responses: ‘Of the critiques of your work, which one do you find most lucid? Did Colquhoun come close, or Eisenman’s reply in Oppositions?’ And other forms of questions intended to position: ‘Do you see yourself as a mannerist?’ Or: ‘Have you been influenced by the writings of Umberto Eco at all?’ But the piece was bookended by questions around a local reprise of the Roma Interrotta project in which twenty architects responded to the brief to ‘complete’ the John Verge building Engehurst (1834– 1835). Questions sought to arm the journal with the views of the centre to advance their own criticism: ‘This conference was set up around the Engehurst exhibition. Do you think it was successful?’ and ‘What is your real opinion of the Engehurst entries?’16 The interview with Koolhaas is more combative, but nonetheless begins with similar intentions: ‘What do you think of the conference?’ and ‘Did you find anything particularly Australian in the Engehurst entries and their presentation?’17 With Baird, the subject turns quickly to commentary and the possibility of articulating a role for the generation to which the editors themselves belonged. ‘What do you consider your role to be in the swing towards discourse on architecture?’ Baird’s response invokes the figure of Philip Johnson, who ‘came to architecture through commentary. In fact, more and more people who are in the “avant-garde” have come to it through commentary’. As the interviewer pushes the point to extract a lesson, Baird responds: ‘Maybe you’re overstating it.’18 Across its next few issues Transition extended this programme of assessment and advice by publishing interviews with, among others, Charles Moore, Melvin

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Charney, Manfredo Tafuri, Louis Hellman, Kazuo Shinohara, Piers Gough and Frank Gehry – interviewed either on the occasion of a visit to Australia or elsewhere, as Transition’s overseas “correspondents” capitalized on opportunities afforded them in their sojourns.19 By the publication of the three-issue volume 3 (spanning 1982–1984), interviews filled the bulk of its pages. ‘The Interview Issue’ marked the magazine’s shift from a tacit dependence on RMIT to its institutionalization as the institute’s official voice, presenting conversations with Hans Hollein, Peter Cook, Kenneth Frampton, Steven Izenour, Stanley Tigerman, Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind – all orientated towards making diagnoses of the state of a present in which the standing of Australian architecture and debate on architecture remained a central and live question, irrespective of whether it was posed explicitly or assumed (Figure 7.2).20 There is much to be found in these early issues of Transition, but one point should be made clear: the magazine made room – enough to count – among

FIGURE 7.2 Cover of the Interview issue of Transition (April 1984). Copyright RMIT Faculty of Architecture and Design.

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the issues of AD and Oppositions that were defining postmodern architecture and architecture discourse for Australian architects, academics and students. Its dalliances with theory for the most part are indices rather than monuments of the moment, but in their sum they offered a foundation to two more substantial institutional enterprises to follow: the theoretically acute study of Australian architecture history (which would, from the mid-1990s, find other venues and there flourish) and an institutionalized interrogation of architecture’s intellectual agency that privileged the field’s own modes of interrogation and explication. As Transition became the official voice of RMIT, the incoming editors (who included McDougall in their number) addressed the nature of this changed outlook: In the first editorial, in July 1979, Transition raised the hope for a growing discourse, centred on local activity and thought that could be made accessible through the magazine. This old chestnut would, in 1984, appear to be no longer the banner it was then, given the plethora of touring speakers and publications that are now consumed by the architectural public. Yet, there remains an equivocation, here, of the position of the intellectual, the speculative and the conceptual within architecture. Where can the intellectual exist? Is discourse limited to an elite or eccentric group of obsessive avant-guardists, or to the design studios of the architecture schools, or, perhaps, to the dinner chat of the profession?21 These questions would, for Transition, remain unresolved, as would that of where discourse ‘belongs’ in the institutional landscape of Australian architecture. While Transition took a nuanced view of the issues, other venues were less drawn to the fine grain. Architecture Australia offers a counterpoint in this respect, confirming the role assumed by journals in this moment as it illustrates the limitations of mainstream architecture culture to shape postmodern architecture debate.

Responding in kind If Transition was a clearinghouse for postmodern architecture culture in Australia, it nonetheless privileged discourse and theory over buildings, and moments of speculation over realized work. In contrast, the remit of AA was much more pragmatic: documenting the world of the moment as it concerned Australian architects. The way AA registered what was happening in the pages of Transition admits something of the position granted to postmodern theory and debate in that world. While many in the Australian profession regarded the advent of postmodernism with disdain, the Institute’s ‘Pleasures of Architecture’ conference and the outcome of the Australian Parliament House competition placed it firmly in the centre of national concerns – alongside AA’s standard fare of articles on services,

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building performance and fee structures. How to position the kind of seemingly interior discussion staged in Transition – between students, recent graduates and an emerging academic class – for a professional readership? Tom Heath became editor of AA in the immediate wake of ‘Pleasures’, recognizing the significance of the attention garnered around the conference and the attendant architectural competition to engage with the kinds of postmodern themes widely appreciated from reading Venturi and Jencks and from the provocative drawings of Roma Interrotta – for many Australian readers, the three pillars of postmodern architecture discourse.22 Situated between the profession and the academy, Heath sought to accommodate debate on architectural postmodernism, publishing among articles treating new projects pieces exploring postmodern themes. Into this mix he introduced articles of a more academic bent, reflecting the accommodations made, too, by Transition with the national rise of an observable publishing culture among the country’s schools of architecture. At the same time, Heath editorialized with greater frequency across the early 1980s on the role of architecture theory, on the relationship of academic work to professional work, on Australia’s tendency towards parochialism and on the ‘traps’ of architecture discourse.23 A sustained diagnosis of modernism’s failings gained hold in AA, applying salt to intergenerational wounds. New books of an historical and theoretical cast were put to review, alongside increasingly discursive reviews of significant (postmodern) Australian architects and buildings. Heath launched his ‘Discourse’ experiment in 1984, inviting contributors to submit work under this theme to peer review, from which five articles were published – curiously framed by a statement regarding the review process rather than by commentary on the issue’s ambitions.24 They included a Foucaultian analysis of early Tasmanian prisons by John Macarthur, a speculative piece by Peter Proudfoot on Philip Johnson’s relationship with Palladio, and a reflection by Transition regular Michael Jorgensen on the role of criticism. Alongside these academic curios were a number of (more lively) long-form pieces of architectural criticism, again including two authors who were in the Transition stable, namely Drew and Hamann – who, it must be noted, were no strangers to AA and hardly limited their writing to Transition in these years. In its ambitions and its tone, there is enough of a relationship between Heath’s inaugural ‘Discourse’ section and the early issues of Transition to see the application of a lesson at work. ‘Discourse I’ might have sought a balance between competing definitions of architecture as a profession and as a discourse, but ‘Discourse II’ exposed the edges of that experiment as AA became, for one issue each June until the end of the decade, an academic journal publishing articles of uneven (but mainly poor) quality that the profession and academia could both safely ignore, which they did consistently. The institutional pressures to which Heath had responded in AA were likewise played out in the pages of Transition in these same years, albeit with greater success in the latter venue: a conflation of the imperative for architecture culture to be more

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discursive, as a function of postmodernism; and for those within the university system to be more productive as researchers, a function of the university’s concessions to late capitalism. It would take another decade for an Australian academic publishing culture in the historical criticism and theoretical historiography of architecture to settle into the patterns that remain more or less in place today: a fairly clear split between academic and professional worlds, a stable library of journals in architecture theory and history, and now well-established organizations fostering this culture.25 Heath recognized the inevitability of this shift and staged its consequences in the journal of record, putting a light on a version of architecture’s contemporary discourse that could not sustain the attention. Transition sought to extend the ideas-driven discussion of architecture it knew, from direct experience, to exist in the local intellectual hotspots of Melbourne and Sydney. Articles in both journals, but especially in Transition, had initially scoped across a range of genres, including historiographical articles, readings of key contemporary texts, theoretical reflections on current themes, and documentation of contemporary architectural propositions. Increasingly, though, and across the second half of the 1980s, it regularly hosted the academic set piece to the consistent exclusion of those looser forms of design speculation and long-form criticism that had served the journal’s earliest ambitions to bridge professional and academic worlds. In many respects, the persistent failure of AA’s ‘Discourse’ documents the weaker end of a discursive spectrum on which Transition earnestly occupied a middle ground, with flashes of brilliance that remain important to local debate decades later.

The problem of the centre The understated reprimands by Michael Graves and his international co-stars in the pages of Transition pointed to a degree of naivety as the magazine weighed into the debates maintained at theory’s centres. And it exposed, in turn, the naivety with which Heath had replicated, in miniature, its own ambitions to take part in a discussion that had clearly come of age. In the first issue of Transition 4 (November 1984), Michael Anderson reviewed Heath’s experiment under the title ‘AA and the Jejune June’. Prefacing long breakdowns of each article, Anderson welcomed the ‘unexpected pleasure’ of a journal that ‘has long been a reliable forum for matters of RAIA moment’ welcoming ‘serious writings on architecture’: a ‘sudden blossoming of discourse within the pages of AA’ that is overshadowed by the claim that academic process rather than debate born of some kind of evident necessity might result in quality discourse.26 A series of snippy characterizations follow, after which Anderson observes: ‘So, after some sixty-four pages, the discourse ends and the advertisements begin again.’ The issue offered, he observed, a disappointing glimpse into an orthodox and conservative view of the more promising work happening

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elsewhere. (Anderson’s counterpoint is the RMIT Gallery show Architecture as Idea.) ‘Perhaps as a warning’, he writes, ‘to any who innocently expected erudite and topical debate within, and as an elegant précis of the editorial attitude to discourse, the front cover displays a cartoon which sets the tone for most of the contents. It depicts a soap-box-mounted architect, finger-pointing skywards, mouthing unrelated jargon. None of the surrounding figures pay any heed’.27 (Figure 7.3)

FIGURE 7.3 Cover of the first Discourse issue of Architecture Australia (June 1984). Copyright Architecture Media.

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It is not difficult to suggest that Heath’s experiment with AA failed, nor surprising that his successor did not take the ‘Discourse’ issues into the 1990s. Its failure was not, though, in positioning discourse in the Australian architectural landscape, but rather in equating the kind of conceptual problems with which readers had engaged in the early pages of Transition with the kind of institutional problems then being confronted in the country’s architecture schools, which had effectively marked out theory as theirs alone. And while the disjunction between architecture as defined by the theoretician and architecture as defined in the office suggested a productive opportunity to foster debate and to explore architecture’s interior pluralities, historical debts and edge conditions, the main lines of postmodern architecture in Australia had much less to do with a discursive postmodernism than with the matters of national or regional identity, on one hand, and stylistic freedom, on the other: in both senses exercising a generational break. Despite the appearance or endurance of a number of practices demonstrably adept at processing extra-architectural ideas in architectural terms – those architects who comprised the professional constituency of Transition – the issues of AA published across the 1980s silently followed what was at best a delicate patience on the part of the Australian profession that a return to a stout pragmatism in later decades would seem to have rewarded. In this, Transition tracked another kind of more subtle, slow-burn failure: to maintain a mode of criticism and criticality that had been present in its intentions except on institutionally circumscribed terms that fostered the production of theory and historical criticism and its insularity. These two cases ultimately tell us less about the advent of postmodernism in Australia than something of one of the most durable effects of the moment in which postmodern discourse figured: the emergence of the academic as a figure occupying a world deemed from within to be of decisive pertinence to the field of architectural practice, while being viewed from the drawing table with deep suspicion. If postmodern academic culture served up avid consumers of the discourse that Munday and McDougall had insisted Australian architecture desperately needed, the insistently more pragmatic world of mainstream architectural practice was largely content to do without, and to consign architectural criticism in both long and short forms to a question of marketing. Transition was for several years a great success, but its success was much less on the terms intended by its founders than in shaping a mode of practice and a community of thinkers about architecture to which present-day writers in Australia owe a great debt – as scholars, however, rather than as architectintellectuals. While the pages of AA, on the other hand, and beyond ‘Discourse,’ might document valiant efforts to bridge the gap between the critic and the architect, architectural writing and design, they ultimately demonstrate the ascendency on purely professional terms of a multi-strained architectural postmodernism in the classicism and semiotics of the Australian Parliament, in the late-modern humanism of the Queensland Cultural Centre (Robin Gibson,

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first phase completed 1985), in the regionalism of the so-called Sydney (or Nuts and Berries) School described by Taylor and the climatic regionalism of the Sunshine Coast & (as an exception to the broader point) the ‘Venturian’ adventures of Edmond and Corrigan. The AA ‘Discourse’ on architecture was lively to the extent that it reflected a mission to share with the profession the preoccupations of those teaching the next generation of architects. In doing so, however, it tended to look to issues that were dislocated from the matters with which the profession was most pressingly preoccupied, or which would (following the line of Transition) have fostered a more open notion of architectural practice. And in this respect, the printed sources for architectural postmodernism in Australia were ultimately not, and despite all efforts to the contrary, the home-grown attempts to account for an increasingly available postmodern architecture debate in the local press, but rather those magazines and journals that were shaping architecture of the 1970s and 1980s the world over: AD, Oppositions, Casabella, et cetera – those journals that would find, in Australia, an engaged and attentive readership on the basis of the authority still (and paradoxically) commanded by the centre, elsewhere.

Notes 1 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History

(Melbourne: Sun, 1966). 2 New doctoral research by Mark Sawyer at the University of Western Australia is taking

a broader view on the journal. See, for instance, Mark Sawyer, ‘Call-and-Response: Group Formation and Agency enacted through an Architectural Magazine, its Letters and Editorials’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, eds, Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, ‘Architecture, Institutions and Change’ (Sydney : SAHANZ, 2015), 548–557. 3 Architecture Australia had been published under various names since 1904 and served

as the official voice of the RAIA since 1938 (then as Architecture). See Paul Hogben, ‘Architectural Periodicals’, in Philip Goad and Julie Willis, eds, The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35. 4 Philip Drew, ‘Mannerism in Contemporary Architecture’; Swetik Korzeniewski,

‘Kidsville’; and Jeff Turnbull, ‘Morality and the Architecture of Charles Moore’, Transition: Discourse on Architecture 1 (July 1979), 4–10, 11–13, 14–21, resp. 5 J.M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1968). 6 ‘Editorial’, Transition 1, 1 (July 1979), 3. 7 ‘Editorial’, Transition 1, 1 (July 1979), 3. 8 ‘Editorial’, Transition 1, 2 (November 1979), 3. 9 ‘Editorial’, Transition 1, 2 (November 1979), 3.

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10 Jennifer Taylor, ‘Looking at the Sydney School’, 4–8; Graham de Gruchy, ‘Architectural

Style in Brisbane’, 25–32; Cathy Peake, Philip Drew and Michael Anderson, ‘An Exhibition by Four Melbourne Architects’, 9–14; ‘9 Designs from Melbourne: Parliament House Competition’, 14–24; Richard Munday, review of Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Postmodern Architecture, by C. Ray Smith 33–34; ‘Letters, etc’–, Transition 1, 2 (November 1979), 34–35. 11 Philip Drew, ‘Postmodern: The Renewal of Style in Architecture’, 9–16; Swetik

Korzeniewski, Paul Desney and Terry Dorrough, ‘Parliament House Entry’, 21–22; Darryl Jackson Pty Ltd, ‘Premiated Parliament House Entry’, 23–25; and John Rockey, ‘In Search of a National Symbol’, Transition 1, 3 (March 1980), 26–32. This issue also included a design project by Michael Trudgeon (‘3345: A Project’, 3–5), an esoteric piece by Peter Kollar (‘Ars Sine Scientia Nihil: In Praise of Knowledge’, 17–20) and an interview with William Turnbull Jr (6–8). 12 Michael Keniger, ‘The Romance and Illusion of the Architecture of High Technology’,

Transition 1, 4 (October 1980), 36–40; Conrad Hamann, ‘Contemporary Architecture and the American Freestyle (1850–1930)’, Transition 2, 1 (March 1981), 4–10; Terry Smith, ‘Design and Revolution: Paris – Moscow, 1900–1930’; and Jennifer Taylor, ‘Architecture in Tasmania 1930–80’, Transition 2, 2 (June 1981), 32–36, 37–42, resp. 13 A notable competition with similar stakes as the Australian Parliament House was

for the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, treated as ‘Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame Competition: Winners and Others’, Transition 2, 1 (March 1981), 22–30. 14 Consider, for instance, John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with

Architects (New York: Praeger, 1973). 15 Paul Hogben has addressed this event at length: ‘The Aftermath of “Pleasures”:

Untold Stories of Post-Modern Architecture in Australia’ (2003), in Andrew Leach, Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully, eds, Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 156–166. This conference and the architectural competition held in conjunction with the conference were given only passing, editorial treatment in Transition 1, 4 (October 1980), 3. 16 Interview with Michael Graves, Transition 1, 4 (October 1980), 6–13. 17 Interview with Rem Koolhaas, Transition 1, 4 (October 1980), 6–13. 18 Interview with George Baird, Transition 1, 4 (October 1980), 6–13. 19 Interviews with Charles Moore, Richard Burton and Melvin Charney were published

in Transition 2, 2 (June 1981), 4–6, 7–9, 9–10, resp.; with Manfredo Tafuri and Louis Hellman in Transition 2, 3–4 (September–December 1981), 7–12, 13–15, resp.; and with Kazuo Shinohara, Piers Gough, Stuart Cohen and Frank Gehry in Transition 3, 2 (February 1983), 6–10, 11–15, 16–21, 22–26, resp. 20 ‘The Interview Issue’, Transition 3, 3–4 (April–July 1984). Munday went on to take the

Master of Environmental Design program (MED) at Yale and reprised something of this approach in Perspecta 23 (1987), which he edited together with Frederick Groen. 21 ‘Editorial’, Transition 3, 3–4 (April–July 1984), 4. The journal was now produced by an

editorial committee comprising Ian McDougall, Conrad Harmann, Greg Missingham, Peter Corrigan, Neville Quarry, Peter Myers, Bill Busfield and Geoffrey London.

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22 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum

of Modern Art, 1966); Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977); Michael Graves, ed., Roma Interrotta, special issue, AD 49, 3–4 (1979). Compare Jennifer Taylor’s treatment of this period in Australian Architecture since 1960 (Sydney : Law Book Co., 1986), 192–219. 23 A selection of editorial titles suggests the flavour of the Heath years: ‘If that is the

answer, what is the question?’ Architecture Australia (AA) 69, 3 (July 1980), 25; ‘The Eclectic Horseman’, AA 69, 5 (November 1980), 23; ‘Architectural Theory’, AA 70, 5 (November 1981), 29; ‘Five Traps of Architectural Discourse’, AA 71, 2 (March 1982), 17; ‘The Future of Architecture and the Knowledge Gap’, AA 72, 5 (September 1983), 29. 24 Articles in the special issue ‘Discourse I’ – Architecture Australia 73, 4 (June 1984)

– were by John Macarthur (‘Inside and Outside the Separate System’, 20–28), Terry Purcell (‘Aesthetics, Measurement and Control’, 29–38), Michael Jorgensen (‘In their Own Words’, 39–42), Nick Beattie (‘Style in Domestic Building’, 43–48) and Peter Proudfoot (‘Parallels: Philip Johnson and Palladio’, 49–54). Other articles in this issue, published to one side of the peer-reviewed section ‘Discourse’, were by Conrad Hamann (‘Off the Straight and Narrow’, 61–71), David Saunders (‘Impact of the New’, 72–76) and Philip Drew (‘Terra Australia Nondum Cognita’, 77–84). 25 In Australia, the principal venue for this work has for many years been the annual

conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), instigated in 1984. The Society published occasional Proceedings until the mid-1990s, and each year from 1995 onwards. In the 1980s and early 1990s, several papers written for SAHANZ conferences were published in Transition. SAHANZ launched its own journal, Fabrications, in 1989, which since 2013 has been published by Taylor and Francis. Architectural Theory Review is likewise a Taylor and Francis title, having been published by the University of Sydney since 1996. 26 Michael Anderson, ‘AA and the Jejune June’, Transition 4, 1 (November 1984), 30. 27 Anderson, ‘AA and the Jejune June’, 38.

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8 CHARLES MOORE’S PERSPECTA ESSAYS: TOWARDS POSTMODERN ECLECTICISM PATRICIA A. MORTON

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.1 JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD, 1984

One of the canonical definitions of postmodernism originated from Jean-François Lyotard who theorized it as a moment that jettisoned narratives of certainty and wholeness in favour of instability, fragmentation and difference, producing a deep scepticism of all metanarratives. Lyotard characterized the postmodern as a ‘period of slackening’ in which the heritage of the avant-garde was being liquidated, and described postmodern culture in terms of a lack of attachment to stable value or taste. He saw eclecticism as a tool used cynically to overthrow modernism and the experiments of the avant-gardes while avoiding academicism, declaring that: ‘I have read that under the name of postmodernism, architects are getting rid of the Bauhaus project, throwing out the baby of experimentation with the bathwater of functionalism’.2 Denying itself the ‘solace of good forms, the consensus of taste’, Lyotard’s postmodernism rejected nostalgia or a collective sense of aesthetic criteria in favour of an ‘anything goes’ realism that recognized the dominance of profit as the generator of value.3

Two decades before Lyotard’s formulation, Charles Moore wrote essays for the Yale journal Perspecta that formed a prolegomena to postmodern eclecticism, advocating for a new architecture based on commercial, pop, historical and high culture referents. Moore’s Perspecta essays anticipated Lyotard’s formulation avant la lettre. He recognized that the public realm could only be experienced if ‘paid for’, identifying the neoliberal economic order that organized post-war public space. He asserted that contemporary communications and transportation networks had eroded traditional hierarchies, and that eclecticism was the proper response to an over-stimulating, chaotic environment. Beginning with ‘Hadrian’s Villa’ in Perspecta 6 (1960), continuing with the famous ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’ in Perspecta 9–10 (1965), and concluding in Perspecta 11 with ‘Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going To Keep It Unless It Works’ (1967), Moore laid out a programme for an architecture and urbanism that abandoned modernism’s grand narratives. These articles do not form a linear progression of Moore’s thinking, but trace disjointed phases and the influences he absorbed in successive contexts: Princeton, Berkeley, New Haven.4 With an article he co-authored for Landscape in 1962, these essays trace Moore’s critique of modernism, his response to the architectural ‘chaoticism’ of his era, his theory of ‘place’, and the evolution of an eclectic design method based on reference to history, the vernacular and popular culture.

Perspecta and the prehistory of postmodernism Founded in 1952 as the student-edited journal of the Yale School of Architecture, Perspecta was a crucial venue for promulgating critiques of modernism and postmodern ideologies. It published numerous essays by Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, James Stirling, Vincent Scully and others that proved seminal to the rise of postmodern architecture. Occupying a media role between a trade magazine and a scholarly journal and protected from the taint of profit-motive by its academic pedigree, Perspecta expounded an array of emergent ideological positions to the literati of architecture culture. Henry-Russell Hitchcock averred that ‘Perspecta has never offered the last word on any subject, but quite often it has uttered what (in the context, at least) was the first word’.5 For Robert A.M. Stern, editor of the massive Perspecta 9–10 (1965), the journal has had great impact on architecture discourse because its student editors introduced ‘little-known provocative talents and ideas to a slender, but influential slice of the architectural community’.6 Initially, it focused on architects and critics affiliated with Yale, but its scope expanded dramatically towards populism in the mid-1960s when Moore became chair of the Yale architecture department. Unlike other journals, the editor

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of Perspecta changed with each issue, disrupting the advance of a static editorial dogma or even a consistent point of view. From its beginnings, Perspecta registered a deep loss of belief in the modern movement, ironically just at the moment when modernism triumphed. Joan Ockman has pointed out that reading the first years of Perspecta gives the impression that postmodernism was a continuous development from the 1950s rather than a sharp break from modernism.7 Early issues included such unconventional subjects as Roman ruins, Piranesi drawings, vernacular buildings and nineteenth-century eclectic design. The interests cultivated within the hermetic environment of Yale’s School of Architecture differed from those expressed in other venues and separated its discourse from the obsession with ‘chaos’ in post-war architecture that occupied architects elsewhere.8 Disseminated by Perspecta, the Yale cohorts of the post-war period constructed a highly influential critique of ‘Bauhaus’ architecture, purism and functionalism. One of the first salvos, Philip Johnson’s ‘The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture’ published in Perspecta 3 (1955), targeted core principles of functionalism (history, pretty drawing, utility, comfort, cheapness, serving the client and structure) and challenged the modern canon he had helped codify twenty years earlier.9 In ‘Seven Crutches’, he enunciated the post-war generation’s Oedipal relation to the heroic period of modernism: ‘We have fortunately the work of our spiritual fathers to build on. We hate them, of course’.10 The shared mission to overthrow ‘purity’ and functionalism and the quest for new models was directed toward practice, to the ways the material on the pages of Perspecta could be activated for design in the studio and without. This emphasis on making the discourse actual is registered in Perspecta when built work was published as a complement to theoretical and historical essays. Design work by authors was often inserted after their articles, thereby making the connection explicit. Perspecta 7 (1961) was a symposium on current American architecture, taking the form of a dialogue between the work of five Yale-affiliated architects (Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, John Johansen and Paul Rudolph) and five critics/historians (Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, James Gowan, Walter McQuade, Peter Collins and Colin St. John Wilson), the latter of whom provided commentaries on the work of the designers.11 Moholy-Nagy’s contribution, ‘The Future of the Past’, identified an emerging interest in history, which had been banished during the 1920s and 1930s, when there was no common bond between ‘Western civilization as it is expressed in the accumulated evidence of building history’ and International Style architecture.12 In the 1950s, she asserted, ‘the top designers of International Architecture … discovered a harmonic triad of contemporaneousness, projection into the future, and responsibility toward the past’.13 History-starved practitioners who reconnected with cultural memory were effecting a reconsideration of the past that might counteract what she pessimistically identified as a cynical, unprincipled commercialism that had taken over the profession. She withheld judgement as to whether the re-appreciation for history indicated a genuine revolution or a fad.14

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The Perspecta issues in which Moore’s articles appeared document this growing attention to historic architecture, and an accelerating concern with vernacular building, mass culture, suburbia and popular environments. In Perspecta 6 (1960), the issue in which the Hadrian’s Villa essay appeared, its editor, James Baker, published an article on Charles Edouard Jeanneret – whose work was little known at the time – and James Stirling’s article ‘The “Functional Tradition” and Expression’, which provided commentary on his own work in relation to anonymously designed buildings (the Functional Tradition) and historical structures equally.15 The double issue Perspecta 9–10 (1965) edited by Robert A.M. Stern included many essays seminal for postmodernism in architecture: a preview excerpt from Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, Philip Johnson’s ‘Whence & Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture’, George Hersey’s ‘Replication Replicated, or Notes on American Bastardy’ (on Victorian historicism), and Vincent Scully on ‘Doldrums in the Suburbs’, among others.16 Mylar-covered Perspecta 11 (1967), edited by Peter de Brettville and Arthur Golding, chronicled a ‘third generation’ of young modern architects who adopted complexity and an inclusive, ‘both/and’ approach reflecting a ‘new relationship between art and society’.17 The work in issue 11 ranged from essays by Moore, Venturi, Stirling and others of the third generation to articles by or about artists Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Don Flavin, Claes Oldenberg and John Cage. There were notable lacunae in the Perspecta agenda; until Moore became chair of architecture in 1965, Perspecta included no articles on popular culture, suburbanization, mass media or other such contemporary issues.18

Hadrian’s Villa Moore’s 1960 essay on Hadrian’s Villa is concerned primarily with reading the villa’s simple geometry of circles and squares in order to understand its meaning for twentieth-century architects, but it begins with a brief meditation on the parallels between his and Hadrian’s eras that hints at later preoccupations (Figure 8.1). Written after he returned to Berkeley from Princeton, where he did graduate work, this essay bears the influence of Louis Kahn’s quest for order in geometry and of Moore’s deep interest in architecture history. The size of Hadrian’s endeavours, his megalomania for culture and self-aggrandizement, and his success at building empire were ‘Texan’, but Moore maintained that the major point of rapport between Hadrian’s and our time was eclecticism. While Moore conceded that ‘eclectic’ ‘has been a dirty word for most of the twentieth century’, he sought to resuscitate it because of the link it afforded between Hadrian’s experience of the world and the current moment.19 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson had vilified eclectic revival styles as ‘a decorative

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FIGURE 8.1 Charles Moore, ‘Hadrian’s Villa’, Perspecta 6 (1960), 22.

garment to architecture’ and the root of the evil in nineteenth-century architecture that devalued style in general: ‘The chaos of eclecticism served to give the very idea of style a bad name’.20 In the immediate post-war, eclecticism had undergone a partial reappraisal under the impetus of the turn to history that Moholy-Nagy identified and the experiments in historically inflected architecture that resulted. A 1953 article by Carroll Meeks attempted to bridge between nineteenth-century eclectic revival styles and the twentieth-century international style and to discern the logic that disciplined eclecticism. Meeks ascertained a historical progression

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from what he called ‘symbolic eclecticism’ (in which the literal forms of the remote past are juxtaposed for symbolic and associative reasons) to ‘synthetic eclecticism’ (in which elements from the past are combined in single buildings), and ending with ‘creative eclecticism’ (in which the elements from the past are valued as the means for creating something original).21 Creative eclecticism lead to a ‘gradual sloughing-off of the residue of past forms’ and the rise of modern architecture that adhered to the rule of suitability of form to function.22 Moore found a similar type of eclecticism in the Villa’s references to buildings and locations that Hadrian encountered as he travelled across his empire. Hadrian was able to represent celebrated structures (Lyceum, Academy, Prytaneum, Canopus, Stoa Poikele, Tempe) and transform them into a new eclectic Roman style of masonry forms ordered by geometry. Creative rather than imitative, the eclecticism of Hadrian’s Villa did not follow an imperative to match form with function, but consisted of a riot of geometry at massive scale that had no discernible use. Moore drew an analogy between the diversity of Hadrian’s referents and the contemporary environment – over-endowed with sources and stimuli that cannot be easily reconciled into an Albertian whole. Every time we ride the subway, for example, we are treated to: maybe thirty different kinds of appeal – from abstractions in the manner of Mondrian on behalf of a bank through figures shaped like Life Savers or cigarettes to a delicate line, vaguely Botticellian, which outlines a lady left clean and delicate by the right kind of shampoo – and what is more, we respond to all of them.23 Like the eclectic world of Hadrian’s Villa, we are bombarded with images from all types of media. We cannot shut them out, nor can we choose among them; we must transform this flood of images. Learning from Hadrian’s Villa, Moore formed a methodology for the eclecticism of his subsequent work. In 1962, he designed a house for himself in Orinda, California, in the hills above Berkeley, that reflects his reception of Hadrian’s Villa. The Orinda house consisted of a pyramidal-roofed square pavilion containing two aediculas built of eight salvaged Tuscan wood columns. The diminutive structure makes reference to Japanese pavilions, early California farm buildings, medieval reliquaries, Roman baths, Baroque baldacchinos, primitive huts, Mayan and Hindu temples, and Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bathhouses. While the external form of the house bears a resemblance to the Trenton Bathhouses, the interior derives from the colliding geometries of Hadrian’s Villa and the spatial complexities of John Soan’s aediculas. The aediculas divided the pavilion interior into two discrete but open square rooms, one of which sheltered a sunken bathtub, an allusion to the now-dry water elements in Hadrian’s Villa. The tub sat in full view, without enclosure, reflecting ‘a chance to explore ways of accommodating

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eccentric living patterns a little more daringly than in our houses for others’.24 The furnishings of this bachelor lair form a diverse collection that had been accumulated on Moore’s own peregrinations – Mexican folk art, a goat skin, camp chairs, drafting lights, a Chinese shop sign, and ornaments from buildings in New Orleans, Sag Harbor, San Francisco and New York – echoing Hadrian’s eclectic assemblage.25

The public life In his most famous essay, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Moore diagnosed the demise of the public realm in rapidly developing Western cities and advocated for places of highly concentrated experience as an antidote to the bleak monotony of suburban sprawl. Charged by the editors of Perspecta 9–10 (1965) with analysing monumental architecture and the urban scene on the West Coast, he scrutinized decentred, anti-monumental cities like Los Angeles and their typically rootless and standardized development (Figure 8.2). Acceding to the absence of monumental urban architecture in California, Moore looked to ‘what we have instead’. Monumentality was more than composition, flamboyant form or conspicuous consumption, but was ‘a function of society’s taking possession of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the earth’s surface, and of the

FIGURE 8.2 Charles Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Perspecta 9–10 (1965), 59.

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society’s celebrating their pre-eminence’.26 According to Moore, a monument is ‘an object whose function is to mark a place’ and the public realm was defined by marking those important places.27 Moore’s theory of ‘place’ had developed in an earlier work, ‘Toward Making Places’, which appeared in J.B. Jackson’s journal Landscape in 1962.28 Co-written with colleagues in Berkeley’s Department of Architecture and composed of a series of individual contributions, ‘Toward Making Places’ employed cultural geography’s conception of place as a means to reform architectural practices exhausted by the dogma of orthodox modernism. The manifesto asserted: ‘The architect’s task is more than the manipulation of materials and the molding of space; it is the definition and possession of place’.29 Moore believed architects had lost faith in modernism and its coherence. While the environment grew constantly ‘messier, more chaotic, more out-of-touch with the natural world and more inimical to human life’, the basic function of architecture had been forgotten: the creation of place. ‘The forms which the famous “form givers” give, and even the spaces which some of those forms enclose, become far less important than the places which we establish and of which we establish possession’.30 Moore and his co-authors redefined design as the creation of places and reconceived architecture in terms of symbolism and use, establishing the user’s needs and desires as the starting point of the process. This theory of place promised to compensate for architecture’s double alienation from the natural world and from its users and to produce ordered, bounded spaces that would counter the chaos and monotony of the contemporary environment. Weaving together place and the urban in ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Moore recalled José Ortega y Gasset’s definition of the polis as an empty space (the agora) outlined by walls and differentiated from the countryside around it. For Moore, the process of physically and politically demarking a place as important and separate from others constituted the essence of both urbanity and monumentality. He linked creation of places, civilization, cities and the public realm to the willingness of individuals to sacrifice something to the public, but noted that in Los Angeles, and other new cities in the West, ‘hardly anybody gives anything to the public realm’.31 Without a clear consensus on what the public realm might be or who needs it, the monumental diminished in importance, leaving Moore to seek a new definition of the public that might render monumentality and urbanity ‘appropriate as functions of our own society and not of some other one’.32 California cities followed a rigid pattern of small houses on lawns and ‘long commercial fingers that follow the highways’ that produces ‘a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity’.33 According to Moore, the public realm in Los Angeles is so nebulous, consisting of a floating world of unrooted buildings and automobiles, that there is not even a place to hold a revolution: ‘If one took over some urban space in LA, who would know?’34 The monumental and the urban as conventionally recognized might be rare in

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California, but there were a few places of distinction. The Santa Barbara County Court House was a Spanish Colonial Revival stage set that Moore lauded for its ‘stew of spatial and sculptural excitements’.35 The Nut Tree, a roadside restaurant on the highway between Sacramento and San Francisco, offered a preview of the urbanity, sophistication and chic that the traveller would soon find at larger scale in San Francisco. Movie theatres – such as Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood – formed ‘image-filled places’ that allowed the public to congregate and provided new monuments for the age. Set among interchangeable subdivisions, freeways and strip malls, Moore regarded Disneyland as ‘the most important single piece of construction in the West … [singlehandedly] replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean and whose center is undiscoverable …’36 While one must pay admission to gain access to the public space of Disneyland, Moore maintained that it could be a model for a new type of public place. ‘Disney has created a place, indeed a whole public world, full of sequential occurrences, of big and little drama, of hierarchies of importance and excitement’.37 It did not include a full range of public experience, such as the political, but Disneyland offered a variety of forms and activities with which every visitor could find something to identify. With Disneyland as a model, Moore called on architects to develop a vocabulary responsive to contemporary society rather than produce generalized forms that only add to the monotonous, floating world of suburbia. By paying attention to ‘those things for which the public has to pay, from which might derive the public life’, architecture could recuperate its ability to create meaningful experiences and places.38 Architects should heed the freeways, the real monuments of the future, as well as Disneyland’s ‘rocketing monumentality, more dynamic, bigger, and who knows? even more useful to people and the public than any the world has seen yet’.39 No one, he claimed, is deluded by the illusions or believed the fantastical settings were real, but the experience of the place is real and exciting to Disneyland’s visitors. Rather than view Disneyland as vulgar entertainment, Moore turned his focus on the user’s experience, as he had advocated in ‘Toward Making Places’, and extrapolated a new public realm from the stimulus provided by its eclectic theatricality. Three non-textual interventions punctuate ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’: a map and black-and-white photographs of Disneyland (66–82); photographs and drawings of three houses by Bay Area Regionalist Joseph Esherick (88–94); and a selection of work by Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (98–106). These portfolios provide a lexicon of forms from which an architect might draw inspiration, in keeping with Perspecta’s engagement with practice. Like the anti-monumentality of Los Angeles, but unlike the ‘rocketing monumentality’ of Disneyland or the freeways, the Esherick and Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW) work is

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modest and private. Only MLTW’s unbuilt West Plaza Condominium project for Coronado, California (1962) and Monte Vista Apartments (1963) approach a public scale. The marked reticence of these rather conventional forms contrasts with the visual excitement and experiential richness promised by the images of Disneyland and the Santa Barbara Courthouse. Yet Moore described the curved plan and three-storey height of the West Plaza Condominium as ‘revolutionary’ for its time: ‘We were doing very dangerous things. On the one hand, we had to make something that appealed to a fairly conservative town; on the other hand, we wanted to make a statement against things we felt were wrong, a revolutionary statement’.40 In 1962, a curved facade could be construed as a radical gesture out of the International Style box and towards historical reference, signalling the distance still to be travelled to the full eclecticism of Moore’s later work.

Electric networks ‘Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works’ returned Moore to a theme he introduced in ‘Hadrian’s Villa’ – the commercial strip, which he believed had more vitality and growth than anything contemporary architects could advance. The layout of ‘Plug It In, Rameses’ acts as a subliminal message of the potency of the strip’s architecture. At the top of each page, a horizontal photograph sits above the photographs of architect-designed work. The first such horizontal image is a grainy segment of a Giza pyramid, a larger view of which is located on the first two pages of the article and blends into night-time views of storefronts along a commercial strip, gradually becoming daytime shots of stores Figure 8.3. The photos form a filmstrip, combining into a continuous, archetypal highway shopping centre. The first line of ‘Plug It In, Rameses’ reiterates the theme of ‘place’ advanced in the earlier Landscape manifesto: ‘If architects are to continue to do useful work on this planet, then surely their proper concern must be, as it has always been, the creation of place, the ordered extension of man’s idea about himself in specific locations on the face of the earth’ (Figure 8.3).41 Unlike the places of the past, such as the city of Peking, which exist in contiguous space and are based on hierarchies of importance that create an inside and an outside, Moore described contemporary places as not bound in one contiguous space or ordered into insides and outsides. The new places are ‘given form with electronic, not visual, glue’ and are ordered around separate places starting and ending at airports. While architects and planners were continuing to design for ‘human scale’ (putting replicas of the Piazza di San Marco in every urban renewal project), ‘people were everywhere changing their effective bodies … extending themselves in whole new ways … [while] the hierarchy of importances from private to monumental has vanished …

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FIGURE 8.3 Charles Moore, ‘Plug It In Ramses And See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going To Keep It Unless It Works’, Perspecta 11 (1967), 37.

replaced by networks much better suited to the instant communication and instant feedback possible today’.42 His new conception of place as network owes a debt to the theories of his former UC Berkeley colleague, Melvin Webber, who criticized place-based conceptions of the city in favour of an understanding of the ‘nonplace urban realm’ created by communications and transportation.43 Webber believed that spatially diffused, socially diverse communities emerged as a function of modern specialization, eroding traditional relations and spatial order. He defined an urban realm as ‘neither urban settlement, nor territory, but heterogeneous groups of people communicating with each other through space’.44 Moore adapted Webber’s concept of communications-based networks to his theory of place as a means for accounting for the non-hierarchical, low-density structure of cities like Los Angeles, which he had previously disparaged as a ‘floating world’ of pointless mobility. From the geographical conception of place posited in ‘Toward Making Places’, Moore’s thinking shifted to a networked idea of place no longer based on contiguous space or hierarchies, but consisting of a-spatial, electronic relations.

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Moore upbraided the ‘architects of exclusion’ for abhorring the commercial strip, which ‘has arrogated to itself more vitality, more power of growth, indeed more inevitability of growth, than the whole of their tidy output put together’.45 Nevertheless, he did not advocate replicating the commercial strip, but called for ‘an architecture of inclusion’ that would engage the vitality of existing civilization, even its redundancies, ambiguities and conflicts. He lauded those architects of inclusion Robert Venturi, Donlyn Lyndon and Peter Millard who sought ambiguity and embraced the life and immediacy of the commercial strip vernacular. As a corrective to the stultifying architecture of exclusion, Moore championed the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California, pointing to the rock grotto entry into the purple velvet upholstered dining room at the Madonna Inn as one of ‘the most surprising and surprisingly full experiences to be found along an American highway’. He celebrated the Madonna Inn’s giant shell basin with gold taps, the rock grotto with the electric eye that triggered a waterfall in the men’s room, the copper covered tables, all of which added up to a ‘moving example of this architecture of inclusion’.46 Far from having been formed by electronic glue, however, the Madonna Inn was constructed out of huge boulders, an inconsistency that persisted in Moore’s thinking about place.

Writing en route to eclecticism Moore’s Perspecta articles were a form of research into themes that undergirded his subsequent work. His ruminations on place, eclecticism, popular culture, the public realm, inclusivity, vernacular environments and historical precedent appeared first in these articles and percolated into his built work. Before his move to Yale in 1966, much of Moore’s work could be characterized as Bay Area Regional style, as typified by his projects at the Sea Ranch. The firm of MLTW designed the ten-unit Condominium #1 based on local building and material traditions: shed roofs without overhangs to deflect the strong, prevailing winds, vertical redwood cladding or shingles, and large windows set flush with the walls. The Moonraker Swim Club, nestled among earth berms that provide protection from the dominant north-west winds and integrate the structure into the site, also uses weathered redwood boards and shed roofs, but features vivid supergraphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Pop found objects. Inspired by local barns, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn and regional Bay Area architecture, the Sea Ranch style was intended as a singular place responding to the coastal site, but became ubiquitous in every building type from ski resorts to office parks. Later work drew on Pop methods, with a particular interest in what he described, in a 1973 interview with Heinrich Klotz, as ‘familiar pieces, mostly cheap pieces, putting them together in ways that have never been before, so as to get something

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that’s strange and revolutionary and mind-boggling and often uncomfortable.’.47 Moore warned that pop art became automatically expensive when it was taken seriously, whereas decoration should be cosmetic, cheap and easily changed by users. The Faculty Club at the University of California–Santa Barbara (1966–1968) is exemplary of his Pop method. In ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, he evoked the Spanish Colonial Revival of Santa Barbara’s Courthouse as an inspiration for the Faculty Club, not as a literal set of forms, but for the vitality of the place’s ‘crazy made up past’ conjured by white walls and ‘crashing incongruities of scale’.48 MLTW pushed eclecticism to its limit, combining neon banners, a Louis Philippe crystal chandelier, images of the Beatles, stuffed rams’ heads, a Moorish Alhambra-like carved-wood ceiling, Jacobean furniture and a quasi-Gothic German renaissance fireplace. At the Faculty Club, the flamboyantly eclectic interior decoration of his Orinda House became public. In the ‘Hadrian’s Villa’ essay, Moore identified eclecticism as the basis for contemporary architecture, a necessary response to the flood of images that assails us daily. He went on to diagnose the rise of a privatized realm where ‘you have to pay for the public life’ and championed Disneyland as an exemplary place of true urbanity and monumentality lacking elsewhere. The ‘Rameses’ essay posited a world in which place had dissolved in the new electric present, hierarchy had disappeared and eclecticism had replaced the old order, but the imperative to mark off some spaces as important remained central to his thinking. He attempted to reconcile the desire for human-centred, delimited places and the appreciation for the mediated environment in which the post-war subject was subsumed. The Madonna Inn inspired Moore to give what might have been the programme statement for his eclectic postmodernism: ‘here there is everything instead of nothing … a kind of immediate involvement … with the vitality and the vulgarity of real commerce … quivers at a pitch of excitement which presages … an architecture for an electric present’.49 Verging on the precipice of chaos, his proclamation hints at the untrammelled exploration of kitsch association and derived forms indulged in Piazza d’Italia and other of his High Postmodern projects. Do his essays fully evade the modernist imperative to a narrative trajectory, however? Do they advance toward disjunction and the proliferation of interchangeable images, as Lyotard theorized the postmodern, or do they instate a new, if more modest, narrative of ‘place-making’ that seeks to ameliorate the effects of late capitalism? As theorized in these essays, ‘place’ approximated a substitute narrative that resituated the subject in a centred, ordered world, even if this was a domain ordered by neoliberal economic logic. The places that Moore proffered as models for architecture – the Santa Barbara County Court House, Disneyland, the Madonna Inn – were characterized by an eclecticism he had recognized in Hadrian’s Villa. If the article on Hadrian’s Villa provided a model for an eclectic method, the other essays intuited how architects could arrogate the barrage of stimuli of the electric present. The discontinuous, episodic

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eclecticism of his best-known projects, which seem to resist any conclusive narrative, belie the counterbalancing allure of ‘places’ that define territory and instate importance, if not hierarchy. Moore oscillated between celebrating the chaos and messiness of the contemporary environment and seeking places that resist its untrammelled, dizzying rush of images by reference to a humanist past. This unresolvable dialectic haunts Moore’s work and postmodern architecture more generally.

Notes 1

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 76.

2

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71.

3

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81.

4

On Moore’s education and early career, see Leslie L. Luebbers, Place, Time, and the Art of Architecture: The Education of Charles W. Moore (Dissertation, New York University, 2001).

5

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘Food for Changing Sensibility’, Perspecta 6 (1960), 3.

6

Robert A.M. Stern, ‘Introduction’, in Robert A.M. Stern, Alan Plattus and Peggy Deamer, eds, [Re]Reading Perspecta: The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xvi.

7

Joan Ockman, ‘Reading Perspecta 1 through 10: The Early Years in Context’, in Stern, Plattus and Deamer, eds, [Re]Reading Perspecta: The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal, edited by Robert A. M. Stern, Peggy Deamer, and Alan J. Plattus (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2004), 775.

8

See Thomas H. Creighton, ‘Sixties; a P/A Symposium on the State of Architecture’, “The Establishment invites You to join in Hushed and Sumptuous Appreciation of the Several Arts, Lincoln Center,” Architectural Forum 125, no. 2 (September 1966): 71–79.Progressive Architecture 42 (March 1961): 122–33.

9

Philip Johnson, ‘The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture’, Perspecta 3 (1955), 40–44. See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1932).

10 Johnson, ‘The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture’, 44. 11 James Baker, ‘Editor’s Note’, Perspecta 7 (1961), 1. 12 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’, Perspecta 7 (1961), 66. 13 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’. 14 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’, 76. 15 James Stirling, ‘The “Functional Tradition” and Expression’, Perspecta 6 (1960), 88–97.

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16 Robert Venturi, ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a

Forthcoming Book’, 17–56; Philip Johnson, ‘Whence & Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture’, 167–178; George Hersey, ‘Replication Replicated, or Notes on American Bastardy’, 211–248; and Vincent Scully, ‘Doldrums in the Suburbs’ Perspecta 9–10 (1965), 281–290. 17 Peter De Brettville and Arthur Golding, ‘About Perspecta 11’, Perspecta 11 (1967), 7. 18 See Ockman, ‘Reading Perspecta 1 through 10’, 779. 19 Moore did not espouse the eclecticism of the new formalism or neo-classical styles

that proliferated in the post-war period. He was openly derisive of the stodgy academic classicism of the new formalism as exemplified by the Lincoln Center, which he and Donald Canty lampooned in “The Establishment invites You to join in Hushed and Sumptuous Appreciation of the Several Arts, Lincoln Center,” Architectural Forum 125, no. 2 (September 1966): 71–79. 20 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 18. Lewis Mumford denounced

the ‘studied resurrection of the dead’ that ‘turned every big city into a cemetery of eclecticism’. Lewis Mumford, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 7. 21 Carroll L.V. Meeks, ‘Creative Eclecticism’, Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians 12, 4 (December, 1953), 18. 22 Meeks, ‘Creative Eclecticism’, 18. 23 Charles Moore, “Hadrian’s Villa,” Perspecta 6 (1960): 17–18. 24 Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon, The Place of Houses (New York:

Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1974), 59–60. 25 See ‘The Lair of the Lone Male’, San Francisco Examiner (3 November 1963), 14. 26 Charles W. Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Perspecta 9–10 (1965), 58. 27 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 58. 28 Donlyn Lyndon, Charles W. Moore, Patrick J. Quinn and Sim Van der Ryn, ‘Toward

Making Places’, Landscape 12, 1 (Autumn 1962), 31–41. See Erik Ghenoiu, ‘Charles W. Moore and the Idea of Place’, Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 18, 2 (2008), 90–119. 29 Lyndon et al., ‘Toward Making Places’, 31. 30 Lyndon et al., ‘Toward Making Places’, 32 and 33. 31 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 58. 32 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 59. 33 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 59. 34 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 63. As he admitted in ‘Plug It In,

Rameses’, he had not anticipated the Watts Riots that took place in 1965, the year ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’ was published. 35 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 60. 36 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 65.

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37 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 65. 38 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 97. 39 Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, 97. 40 John Wesley Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects: Philip Johnson,

Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown (New York: Praeger, 1973), 231. 41 Charles W. Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses, and See if It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t

Going to Keep It Unless It Works’, Perspecta 11 (1967), 43. 42 Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, 35. 43 Melvin M. Webber, ‘The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm’, in Melvin

M. Webber et al., eds, Explorations in Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 79–153. 44 Webber, ‘The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm’, 116. 45 Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, 40. 46 Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, 43. 47 John Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects: Philip Johnson, Kevin

Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown (New York: Praeger, 1973), 235. 48 Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, 43. 49 Moore, ‘Plug It In, Rameses’, 43.

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9 THE ALIBI OF STYLE: READING CLASSICISM IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN MAGAZINE (1979–1982) ELIZABETH KESLACY

These are buildings meant to be read as buildings meant to be read … period. REYNER BANHAM, ‘The Writing on the Walls’, 1978 ‘To read architecture’, ‘to read a building’, or ‘to read a plan’ are ubiquitous colloquialisms in architecture discourse, uttered in every design studio, found regularly in professional magazines and intoned casually in many works of history. The verb ‘to read’ is often used as a stand-in for ‘to scrutinize’, ‘to understand’ or ‘to interpret’, referring to a engagement with objects that do not reveal themselves at first glance, and thus require attention that is prolonged and purposeful. To suggest that one reads a non-textual physical object, drawing or photograph is paradoxical: it is both literally impossible and yet commonplace. ‘Reading architecture’ feels so natural that it is easy to let a whole host of questions slip by that would otherwise emerge if we paused to press the issue. Do we understand reading by metaphor or analogy? Is reading metonymic or synecdochic in nature, referring to some aspect of an exertion that is otherwise distinct? Is reading a euphemism for an activity that could be more precisely but less interestingly named? What does reading imply about the subject doing the reading and the object being read? Can architecture be designed specifically to invite reading? How does one, in fact, learn to read architecture? While one might probe the question of ‘reading’ productively with respect to many periods of architecture history, postmodernism – especially the Anglophone architecture discourse of the 1970s and the 1980s – emerges as a particularly

salient context because of the simultaneity of architecture’s ‘linguistic turn’ and the explicit turn to the reader in literary theory during that period. At the same time that architects began to critically explore notions of architecture as language – to conceptualize architecture in terms of linguistic and semiotic structures, to think of design as a form of communication, and to foreground concerns about formal and visual legibility – literary theorists turned with optimism toward the figure of the reader and the experience of reading to address problems that remained unresolved under the aegis of ‘the author’, ‘the work’ and ‘the text’. Very few architects considered ‘reading’ explicitly; instead, they couched the period’s well-known re-engagement with historical styles as a populist return to known languages. These, in turn, could be understood and manipulated using ideas from linguistics and literary theory.1 However, this essay will suggest that debates about the use of historical style as language were used as an alibi to explore the changing nature of the aesthetic experience proffered by architecture. The postmodern experience refigured the modernist notion of instant, effortless intelligibility as legibility, emphasizing the protracted, procedural process of meaning-making constituted by reading. Both the architect and the experiencing subject of architecture are here figured as readers, the former as a reader of history and the latter as a reader of manipulations of that history – an experience ‘prestructured’ by the architect but reliant on the reader’s participation and contribution for its fullest expression. Crucially, this form of aesthetic engagement relied on the discursive contexts of magazines, books and exhibitions to model and disseminate reading, both for the designer and the receiver. Indeed, the interpretation of projects performed by critics in their writing became both a model for the sort of probing that postmodern works required and a primer of concepts and strategies that architects could use in their design process to elicit such attention. One particularly rich example in which debates about reading were sublimated into conversations on historical style played out in the pages of the London-based Architectural Design (AD) magazine. In the early 1980s, AD published four guest-edited issues in the span of three years that ostensibly explored competing interpretations of the classical tradition: Geoffrey Broadbent’s Neo-Classicism (1979), Charles Jencks’s Post-Modern Classicism (1980) and Free-Style Classicism (1982) and Demetri Porphyrios’s Classicism is not a Style (1982) (Figure 9.1). Through an analysis of these four issues and the debate around the aesthetic engagement of architecture that they convened, I will show that conflicts over the use and meaning of the classical style belied a more fundamental dispute about the form of experience that architecture should offer. The AD classicism issues were published in quick succession as magazine owner and editor Andreas Papadakis2 sought to capitalize on an increasingly contentious phenomenon: architects’ broad and varied re-engagement with the classical idiom, and historical style in general. The issues emerged on the scene amidst

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FIGURE 9.1A Cover, Neo-Classicism (1980), guest-edited by Geoffrey Broadbent. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley.

an outpouring of publications and exhibitions that treated both contemporary and historical architectural design, the latter working to raise historical styles back into contemporary design consciousness. This debate found particularly hospitable conditions in AD, a venue that Papadakis had already established as one of the primary organs of postmodern architecture. Soon after he purchased the magazine in 1975, AD emerged as one of the primary sites where postmodernism was conceptualized and formulated as a distinct discourse.3 This intellectual labour was neatly shared with the publishing house Academy Editions that Papadakis

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FIGURE 9.1B Cover, Post-Modern Classicism (1980), guest-edited by Charles Jencks. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and Michael Graves Architecture and Design.

established in 1967, which published one of the first major statements of the period: Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). The debate manifested by the classicism issues was an extension of conversations and collaborations that were already taking place, both in the magazine and more broadly. Broadbent, Jencks and Porphyrios were all based in Greater London, and each had published in the pages of AD since Papadakis purchased it. The latter two issues on classicism emerged, in fact, out of a symposium entitled ‘Classicism or

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FIGURE 9.1C Cover, Free-Style Classicism (1982), guest-edited by Charles Jencks. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Eclecticism?’ held at the AD offices in the spring of 1981. By late 1981, Broadbent, Jencks and Porphyrios began to appear on the masthead of AD as consultants, a role they shared with Dennis Crompton, Kenneth Frampton and Colin Rowe, among others. As guest-editors, they were wholly responsible for shaping the content and theses of their respective issues, authoring long introductions and articles, choosing the topics and themes, soliciting contributions, and selecting the historical and/or contemporaneous projects to be included. While the individual contributors were

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FIGURE 9.1D Cover, Classicism is not a Style (1982), guest-edited by Demetri Porphyrios. Image reproduced courtesy of Wiley and Dr. Demetri Porphyrios.

invited to submit essays and projects, their assembly as a coherent group within an overarching polemic allows us to attribute the issues’ overall theses to their editors. Not only did these issues centre on the contemporary re-engagement with classicism, but they also addressed, to varying degrees, the linguistic or semiotic turn that had already become a hallmark of postmodern architecture theory. Proceeding from these explicit themes, this essay will demonstrate that the AD classicism issues – their underlying polemics and disciplinary implications – can

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be understood only in the context of reading and the contemporaneous turn to the reader in literary theory, particularly theories of reader-response. Examining the turn to reception in postmodern architecture discourse will allow us a more clear understanding of what has previously been understood only in terms of communication as an outward form of broadcast. Instead, I will show that the activity of reading supersedes writing or speaking to become the conceptual model for design and the procedure for its enjoyment. The AD classicism issues ostensibly addressed the postmodern re-engagement with historical style; however, they also grappled deeply with the problematics of architecture as language as well as the particular strategies of accessing that language, reflecting on the meaning of the discipline’s cultural and historical inheritance and the possibilities of meaning for new works in the world. Some of the foundational concepts of reader-response theory – while not an explicit source of influence for Broadbent, Jencks or Porphyrios – are invaluable in helping to parse the implications of their theses and polemics. Proceeding through the four issues chronologically, I will first show how Broadbent’s linguicization of style prepares the ground for reading as a model for architectural aesthetic engagement. Then, analysing Jencks’s explicit theorizing of contemporaneous architecture and his implicit operations as editor, I argue that his AD issues promoted an aesthetics of reading in architecture. Finally, I explore Porphyrios’s issue as a critique of the readerly implications of Jencks’s polemic. In an essentializing turn, Porphyrios advocated for a self-evident architecture – buildings that were intelligible rather than legible – in an attempt to circumvent the interpretative process altogether.

Geoffrey Broadbent and Neo-Classicism: The linguicization of style Geoffrey Broadbent’s Neo-Classicism (1979), the first issue of AD to specifically address classicism, appeared just one year before he published two major coedited works: Signs, Symbols and Architecture and its companion volume Meaning and Behaviour in the Built Environment.4 Broadbent’s scholarship in the latter texts is steeped in architectural semiotics as well as in the burgeoning field of environmental psychology, neither of which explicitly appeared in Neo-Classicism.5 Unlike Jencks’s and Porphyrios’s issues, which focused on contemporary returns to the classical idiom, Broadbent’s issue was historically orientated, examining past periods of classical recursion in order to explicate the connection between cycles of stylistic change and political and ideological revolutions.6 Countering the common association of classicism with democracy, Broadbent observed that classical turns occurred under a range of political ideologies. He took issue with the self-conceptualization of French neo-classicism as a true return to the ethos

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of antiquity. Countering this, he argued that neo-classicism was rather ‘a thing in its own right’, which utilized antique elements to produce vastly different effects towards wholly distinct ends.7 One important strategy that Broadbent employed to mount his critique was to redefine ‘neo-classicism’ from a circumscribed arthistorical period to a broad category that encompassed all classical returns. The period was enlarged to encompass each period after the Renaissance that utilized some aspect of ancient Greek or Roman architecture – going so far as to include, without comment or explanation, Russian constructivism. This broadening of the neoclassical category served to flatten the relative value of each manifestation, making each stylistic variation equally valid and available to the contemporary architect who might employ them. ‘If the Neo-Classical embraces a variety of modes, including the neo-Greek, the neo-Roman, the neo-Renaissance, and the Rationalist’, he writes, ‘the neo-Classical architect obviously can choose any one of these – or even a combination of them – for the purposes of architectural expression.’8 By flattening the distinctions between versions of classicism and declaring them equally available for contemporary use, Broadbent cleared the way for style to be reconceptualized as language. Style, traditionally reliant on the regulations of decorum and propriety for its legibility and meaning, becomes deployable and manipulable as language when the rules dictating its use lose their force. By demonstrating how multiple political associations have accumulated upon classicism – from democracy to communism and fascism – Broadbent demonstrates that the style’s overburdened polysemy ultimately produces a language of mostly empty signifiers: because they mean too much, they no longer mean very much, leaving the contemporary architect to play freely in its remains. Though Broadbent left contemporaneous architectural production largely unaddressed, his arguments served to legitimize re-engagement with historical style. The conventions of style persist as language, while its past meanings and associations do not. In these conditions, the choice to use classical style is no longer significant; rather, what the architect does with classicism forms the basis of its legibility.

Charles Jencks as demonstrative critic: Modelling reading in Post-Modern Classicism and Free-Style Classicism In the second and third profiles on classicism to be published by AD, Post-Modern Classicism (1980) and Free-Style Classicism (1982),9 Charles Jencks built upon Broadbent’s linguicization of style to reformulate his earlier notion of radical eclecticism in terms of classicism, explicitly calling upon literary terminology to describe architects’ use of the classical language.10 Because writing and reading

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are two sides of the same coin struck from the raw material of language, Jencks’s description of architects’ apprehension and interpretation of history in literary terms deeply implicates the aesthetic experience made available by postmodern works as itself a form of reading. Indeed, in penning the descriptions and interpretations of the projects he includes, Jencks himself becomes an ideal reader whose reading process becomes an exemplary for the readers of AD as themselves readers of architecture. That is to say, his work as a critic becomes genuinely demonstrative for both the architect and the latent reader of architecture. Jencks makes the case in Post-Modern Classicism for an underlying coherence in the seemingly disparate ways that contemporary architects re-engaged with classicism. Their stylistic return was motivated, he claimed, by the desire of architects to ensure that their innovations were legible. Thus, they turned to classicism as a shared language with common structures in order to achieve a form of legibility based on the use and misuse of historical convention. It is here that the figure of the reader first appears: the architect as a reader of history whose interpretation is expressed as a new work, just as a critic’s reading would be recorded in her textual work of criticism. The architect reads in order to write – to design – and the vast and fragmented historical record allows the architect the freedom to choose from among its offerings and to interpret it from the perspective and concerns of her own time. An architect’s reading, in this view, can never be objective, it is not aimed at understanding something essential about a building or inherent to a style. Rather, reading always implies interpretation – it is an activity that begins with the work but develops in the mind of the reader, and becomes most fully expressed when the reader’s ideas, experiences and creativity are brought into collaboration with the work, producing something new. In order to illustrate the readings performed by architects in their own work, in Free-Style Classicism Jencks recruited architects such as Charles Moore, Arata Isozaki and O.M. Ungers to contribute texts that model historical influence and engagement. In essays such as ‘The Ledoux Effect’ and ‘Schinkel’s Free Style Pavilion and the Berlin Tegeler Hafen Scheme’, the architects each performed a close reading of a historical architect or building that influenced their practice, and then described a recent project in terms of that influence (Figure 9.2). For example, in ‘Five Lessons from Schinkel and the architecture Museum in Frankfurt’, Ungers argued that the primary lesson to be drawn from Schinkel is ‘the unification in opposites to form a whole’, based on ‘the coincidentia oppositorum originated by Nikolaus Cusanus … at the threshold of the Enlightenment’.11 In Schinkel’s work, Ungers found a harmonious synthesis of the classical and the gothic, and of order and freedom – one that did not appear as stasis or resolution, but rather as the result of morphological transformation. This he drew upon in his design for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, applying it there to a tension between the museum’s required programme and the existing nineteenth-century villa located on-site. Unger’s interpretation of Schinkel – his

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reading of history – becomes a conceptual model for his own design interventions. In turn, his essay serves as a model both for other architects and for readers of architecture.

FIGURE 9.2A AND B Spreads from Oswald Mathias Ungers, ‘Five Lessons from Schinkel’, in Free-Style Classicism, Architectural Design Profile (1982). Images reproduced courtesy Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft and Wiley.

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For Jencks, however, the building as the result of reading was only half of the equation. Reading was not only something that generates design, but also the experience that is explicitly offered up by new works. Reading, interpretation and production are elided into one protracted engagement intended not only to document a reading but also to offer that experience to those who encounter its results. This can be seen in Jencks’s major conceptual strategy. The interpretation of architecture is performed in terms of language, in Jencks’s account, when ‘the past becomes a field for rhetorical operations.’12 If rhetoric is concerned with form over content – how something is said rather than what is said – then in its reading, history becomes the material to be manipulated by the architect, and it is those manipulations which are foregrounded in the new work. The operations with which architects engage with historical language in Post-Modern Classicism are an extension of those Jencks introduced in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. There, Jencks employed diverse linguistic and semiotic terminology to account for contemporary architectural production, such as word, sentence, metaphor, index, icon, symbol, semantics and syntactics – quietly omitting the standard definition of these terms from their original disciplines. Jencks extends this strategy in his AD issues where he identifies the tactics of formal manipulation in literary terms: personification, paradox, elision and hybridization in Post-Modern Classicism and erosion, amplification, miniaturization and oxymoron in Free-Style Classicism. These are, according to Jencks, techniques with which architects manipulate the conventions of classical style. But they are also conceptual lenses through which to read and interpret works of architecture. The reading performed by the architect finds its corollary in the experience made available by the work they produce. Recognizing that this procedure is neither automatic nor intuitive, Jencks instructs his audience in the methods and pleasures of reading through example, by modelling reading in his own criticism and interpretation – something he does both visually and textually. Drawing on a technique he first deployed in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Jencks visually demonstrates the reader’s work of identifying the historical precedents of contemporary projects. Unlike the essays written by Isozaki and Ungers in which they were explicit about their historical readings, most of the architects’ descriptions of their own projects did not explicitly name their historical influences. However, Jencks visually implies this influence through his inclusion of images of historical buildings alongside the featured project – photographs that were credited to Jencks, and whose captions were written by him (Figure 9.3). But Jencks only occasionally describes the connection he sees between the historical and the contemporary project, so the magazine reader is largely left to generate her own comparisons and conclusions. Jencks’s editorial images indicate that part of the proper mode of aesthetically engaging a postmodernist work is to unpack its historical references and allusions, and to think about how the new work utilizes that history. Textually, Jencks’s editorializing was not limited to his lengthy introductory essays. Rather, as a textual corollary to his visual exegesis, he prefaced each project

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FIGURE 9.3 Spread from Charles Moore, ‘Piazza d’Italia’, in Post-Modern Classicism, Architectural Design Profile (1980). Images reproduced courtesy Charles Jencks, R. Allen Eskew, FAIA, Norman McGrath and Wiley.

description, written by the project’s architects, with his own commentary, which was italicized to distinguish it from the architects’ own statements. This inclusion signalled to readers of the magazine that the architect’s statement was not enough to understand the work, and that its meaning was not fully constituted by the architect’s intentions. In order to understand its larger significance, additional exposition is required – the building must be read. Jencks’s descriptions thus model a way to engage the postmodern work, that is, the proper way to read a building. Consider, for example, his discussion of Robert Venturi and John Rauch’s Pennsylvania Faculty Club that appeared in the introduction to Free-Style Classicism. In the Pennsylvania Faculty Club Venturi and Rauch have amplified a domestic form, the pitched roof house, so that the faculty can eat, as it were, under one domestic roof. Window openings and mullion dimensions are increased, details are simplified, a light green trellis screen hangs above the head indoors, out of context. These odd distortions of convention (even the institutional green is ‘off ’) are not meant to annoy or shock so much as to gently nudge one into looking again at the familiar. In this case several familiar images are partly combined: nave and aisle organization, garden room and, on the outside, large country house or hunting lodge.13 By describing the project in these terms, Jencks imparts a lesson to readers that has to do with what questions to ask of the architectural text. From this example,

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we can surmise that some of these questions include: what formal, spatial and historical references are being made? What elements are present, and how do they deviate from convention? Further, what are the implications of the deviations in the context of the building’s programme? Drawing upon the literary terms provided by Jencks in his two issues of AD, does the design present elements that are made miniature or oversized? Are there hybridized or anthropomorphic elements, can one locate paradoxical or oxymoronic conditions of form and programme, and does the architect utilize historical language that is eroded or elided with a second language or form? The reader must be curious and tenacious. Reading is partly interrogation and partly collaboration. The reader’s knowledge, analytical skills and creativity meet the work and proceed from it to form an interpretation. Over the course of two AD issues ostensibly on classicism, Jencks presents an account of postmodern architecture as proffering an aesthetic experience that requires a sustained, conscious engagement on the part of the viewer. Unlike the modernist building, which strove to be instantly intelligible, the postmodern building purposefully avoids revealing itself at first glance. Every aspect of Jencks’s argument, particularly his discursive strategies, works to teach the reader (both of the magazine and the building, whether architect or layperson) to approach the building as a legible object, available to be read. Conversely, there is a lesson for designers here as well. The procedures of reading are addressed to an audience of designers as a mirror image of the design process. Each of Jencks’s interpretive strategies – the examination of contemporary works for their historical allusions and references, for their uses and misuses of historical style, or for their employment of strategies such as paradox and miniaturization – tacitly prod architects to design projects that support and encourage such engagement.

Demetri Porphyrios: Classicism against reading The last of the AD classicism issues to be published was Demetri Porphyrios’s 1982 Classicism is not a Style.14 Written in direct opposition to Jencks’s project of modern eclecticism, Porphyrios presented an orthodox approach to classicism, as strict and narrow in its conception as Jencks’s version was free and broad, and he took particular umbrage with the linguicization of style and its corollary aesthetics of reading. Porphyrios’s own historical scholarship on what he termed Scandinavian Doricism shaped his critique of the linguistic turn and influenced his aims for contemporary architecture. Through an examination of early twentieth-century (1905–1930) architecture in Sweden and Denmark, he found a form of classicism that combined aspects of the Nordic vernacular with the austerity of the Doric

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order. However, unlike the late nineteenth-century National Romanticism – a period of eclecticism that linguicized the classical style, according to Porphyrios – Doricism restricted itself to an elaboration of construction, or ‘the ontological essence of building.’15 Style in the late nineteenth century, in Porphyrios’s view, became a ‘designatory apparatus’, ‘entrusted with the linguistic function of naming’ whose conception ‘rests not upon a natural movement of comprehension or expression, but upon the reversible, codified, and hence analysable relation of signs and representations.’16 Recognizing the loss of propriety and decorum’s normative force, Porphyrios notes the corresponding dissolution of style’s ‘syntagmatic conditions’ in which one part of language requires, and is required by, another part, leaving in its wake a language with conventions but no rules. For Porphyrios, all that remains in the absence of any normative or ethical force is architecture’s essential nature – construction.17 In his second more polemical essay, ‘Classicism is not a Style’, Porphyrios took aim at modern eclecticism not only for its celebration of style’s linguicization, but particularly at the form of experience that it offered and encouraged: reading. Ironically, Porphyrios recognized more clearly than anyone how the conception of historical style as language implicated a readerly form of aesthetic experience which enrolled the reader as a participant in the production of meaning. In their attempts to endow industrial kitsch with moral and aesthetic value, the literati of pluralism resorted mainly to two operative techniques: first, that of aestheticizing the real; second, that of aestheticizing the process of communication … For kitsch demands of its users the violent jerkiness of advertisement. We know only too well the source of violence in advertisement: its rhetorical figures of speech are used not in order to please, or to incite us to reflect and thereby gain knowledge of our situation, (as is invariably the case with art) but rather in order to abbreviate a message and send it home by tapping our image of the world … In a manner similar to advertisement, Modern Eclecticism, by aestheticizing the process of communication, links experience to mere anagnosis, reading or decodement.18 In accusing modern eclecticism of ‘aestheticizing of the real’, Porphyrios was critical of its meta-discursive self-referentiality, of the way that a building was no longer a building, but rather became a form of representation about building. It was the charge of ‘aestheticizing the process of communication’ that was most damning. Mirroring his argument about Scandinavian Doricism’s rejection of National Romanticism’s linguicization of style, Porphryios asserted that the transformation of architecture into pure language, with its ‘weightless pediments’ and its ‘“neon”-classical cornices’,19 removed it from the realm of sensory experience and left a representational shell that could only be read – something that for him

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was a tragic distanciation from what was most real and fundamental. In his view, the resulting intellectualization of classicism turned away from an earnest, selfevident and fundamental condition of being. Against a linguicized notion of classical style, Porphyrios proposed engaging with the classical tradition through the poeticization of its constructional logic. Architecture begins with a set of ‘constructional a prioris’, the basic functional roles played by building elements when they bore load, formed enclosure or demarcated space. ‘Such constructional a prioris and their ensuing constructional corollaries can be identified – it would appear – beyond fear of interpretive dispute and could therefore serve as the core of common architecture knowledge.’20 From this starting point, architecture becomes fully realized when it represents and makes myth out of its essential constructional nature. In an argument heavily reminiscent of Karl Bötticher’s distinction between core-form and art-form, in which architecture served as the art-form that masked, represented and idealized the constructional realities of building, Porphyrios appeals to the classical language as that which elevates the real rather than replacing it.21 It is in Porphyrios that we find the most explicit articulation of reading as a paradigm of architectural aesthetic experience, and its most strident rejection. In contrast to the multivalence that Broadbent and Jencks see as already a part of classical tradition, Porphyrios appeals to a version of classicism that eschews the possibility of multiple readings and meanings, avoiding polysemy in favour of univalence. By setting classicism atop a foundation of primitive constructional conditions, ‘beyond fear of interpretive dispute’, Porphyrios seeks a classicism that evades misinterpretation by referring ever back to its essential character rather than its complex history. This version of classicism does not require a reader; its truth is posited to exist universally and timelessly. Porphyrios was not alone in his rejection of reading as a form of engaging with architecture. Manfredo Tafuri’s well known 1974 essay ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: the Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’ also explicitly rejected the postmodern linguistic turn, arguing that the architectural interest in communicative structures came on the heels of a real loss in its ability to communicate meaningfully.22 The turn towards language and reading by architects was, in his view, a turn away from the real conditions of production and consumption and an abdication of political and social responsibility. Particularly concerned with its effect on the critic, Tafuri seemed to resent being cast in the role of interpreter or reader of works that ignored what he viewed as the discipline’s most pressing question – architecture’s role in the capitalist system of production and the possibilities for resistance and change. Porphyrios’s view was not so radical. Despite his argument that classicism offered a way to avoid interpretive uncertainty, in asserting a view of classicism as the mythopoeticization of fundamental conditions of construction – that is, in arguing for a particular mode of interpreting the classical language – he ironically continued to

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treat classicism as a representational language that requires a particular approach to its understanding. Assertions of universality notwithstanding, it turns out that even not-reading requires reading – that is, it requires approaching the work with certain categories and questions in mind.

Postmodern synchronicities: Reception theory and the readerly turn The conceptual landscape of reading in which the classicism issues emerged was uneven – despite the regular use of ‘reading’ as a casual term in architecture discourse, few architects, critics, historians and theorists explicitly explored precisely what it meant or entailed. Those that did tended to focus exclusively on the mechanics of the design process from the perspective of the architect.23 Meanwhile, the disciplines of literary theory, semiotics and hermeneutics had shifted attention towards reading as a method of analysis, a phenomenological experience, an historical category, and a form of aesthetic engagement. By the late 1970s the reader was a particularly significant focus in literary theory, which saw the emergence of reader-response criticism and reception theory. A branch of literary theory that turned away from the hermetic formalism of New Criticism to the reader and the activity and experience of reading, reception theory provides one of the most suggestive models for understanding the phenomenon of reading in architecture.24 The fullest understanding of the debate over reading found in the AD classicism issues requires a brief elaboration of some of the ideas central to reader-response theory, which I draw from Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser – major and representative figures in the field. Fundamentally, reception theory locates the literary work in the act of reading and in the mind of the reader, rather than in the text. The reader is active, she builds up the work for herself out of her responses to the text and the way in which it activates memories of past experience. The act of reading is conceived of as an event and a performance, one that is entered into consciously and intentionally. In Iser’s words, ‘the text represents a potential effect that is realized in the reading process.’25 Reception theory acknowledges that readers can approach texts in different modes. One can read closely or in a state of distraction, for pleasure or for information. Rosenblatt was concerned with the latter distinction, which she termed ‘efferent’ and ‘aesthetic’ modes of reading. During efferent (from the Latin verb efferre, ‘to carry’) or non-aesthetic reading, the reader is focused on acquiring information that will persist after reading is completed.26 During aesthetic reading, however, the reader is focused on the experience of the reading event

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itself.27 Similarly, Iser reframed the ‘meaning’ of the work in terms of the reader’s experience. Once understood as something inherent or essential to the work, ‘meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced.’28 It is not interpretation qua result, but interpretation qua experience – aesthetic experience – that engenders meaning and provides enjoyment. Stanley Fish elaborates on this point: In the procedures I would urge, the reader’s activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded, not as leading to meaning, but as having meaning. The meaning they have is a consequence of their not being empty; for they include the making and revising of assumptions, the rendering and regretting of judgments, the coming to and abandoning of conclusions, the giving and withdrawing of approval, the specifying of causes, the asking of questions, the supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles. In a word, these activities are interpretive – rather than being preliminary to questions of value they are at every moment settling and resettling questions of value.29 Ultimately, theories of reader-response call for an ‘aesthetics of reading’ in which the reading act becomes the paradigm of aesthetic experience, and the object of contemplation is reframed as the reader’s own thought process and responses rather than the text.30 Theories of reader-response, however, do not strip the author or the text of all agency. Rather, particularly in Iser’s view, aspects of aesthetic response are ‘prestructured’ by the text through the author’s use of language, structures and devices that signal how the text could or should be read. These textual characteristics, designed to elicit images and affects in the reader’s mind, coalesce around what Iser terms the ‘implied reader’, which ‘designates a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text’.31 In this way, both the author and the reader contribute to the work, which could not exist apart from the relationship they enter into through reading. Theories of reception have been criticized as a pendulum swung too far – that in focusing on the reader they have ignored the crucial contributions of the authors and the particularities of the text – without which no reading can take place. Rather than pit the agency of the author and the reader against one another in a zero-sum game, Stanley Fish instead emphasizes their common membership in ‘interpretive communities’ and the necessity of sharing culturally defined interpretive strategies before a word is written or read. Interpretive strategies are not decoding devices, but they are pre-existing paradigms that both writers and readers utilize. Most importantly, collections of interpretive strategies and the communities they form are not static, automatic nor intuitive. Strategies can be taught and learned, and community membership can be acquired.

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An aesthetics of reading for architecture The debates found in the AD classicism issues extend reading in architecture from a method of historical analysis to one that structures both the reception of buildings and their design. In Jencks’s hands the methods of reception – the questions asked of buildings and the categories of understanding brought to them by their readers – function simultaneously as a model for future readers as well as a normative claim for designers: that their designs should work to elicit such a reading. Rosenblatt’s call for an ‘aesthetics of reading’ is useful in understanding the implications of Jencks’s argument. According to Rosenblatt, ‘the reading act itself [becomes] the general paradigm of all aesthetic experience’, which reminds us that any aesthetic experience one might undergo is not inherent to the text, object or building that prompts it, but rather is located in the reader’s own engagement and responses. Similarly, in Jencks’s hands, reading as a sustained and purposeful form of attention becomes a model and a goal for the aesthetic experience of architecture. And it is the aesthetic engagement with architecture that Jencks emphasizes, rather than other possible modes of engagement. Like Rosenblatt’s distinction between efferent and aesthetic reading, Jencks foregrounds the experience of reading as that which the postmodern classical building primarily offers. While a viewer could choose to interact with a building distractedly, affectively or efferently (attentive solely for navigational cues, for instance), the richest experience is only available through reading. Iser’s notion of ‘prestructuring’ is useful here: while the aesthetic experience occurs in the mind of the reader, the agency of the author-architect is exercised in the work’s prestructuring of the reader’s experiences. Design choices cue the reader to enter into a prolonged and attentive form of aesthetic engagement, by indeed appearing as ‘buildings meant to be read as buildings meant to be read.’32 Further, they provide guideposts to their interpretation, which are available to be followed or ignored. However, neither the architect’s intentions nor her design process ultimately constitute the work’s ‘meaning’. Rather, following both Rosenblatt and Iser, meaning is found in the reading experience itself. Meaning, for Jencks, is found particularly in the critic’s experience of reading – that is, the ideal reading that a well-educated reader familiar with architecture’s history and contemporary trends can perform. What is most meaningful is not the result of that reading, but the experience and enjoyment of unravelling the knot presented by the building. This is a pleasure enjoyed most by the critic. Critics of postmodernism have made much of the apparent disconnect between the movement’s stated desire to reunite architecture with an alienated public through populist forms and the resulting mannerist games that remained inaccessible to the untrained eye. This essay’s reframing of postmodern architecture

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from the sign or the utterance to reading would seem to perpetuate this ‘failure’, because the richest experience of reading is indeed the one that is had by the critic, who reads intentionally, protractedly and creatively, and brings to the work an unsurpassed depth of knowledge. However, what the readerly turn does – what Jencks accomplished in his two issues of AD – is precisely to construct the kind of functional interpretive community in which this meaning can occur. The possession of historical or technical knowledge does not, in itself, guarantee membership in an interpretive community – to that knowledge must be added the categories, questions and procedures that make up a community’s interpretive strategies. Rather than simply instruct his readers how to understand an existing form of design practice, Jencks instead presented a vocabulary and a procedure of interrogation that doubled as the goals and operations of the design process. The classicism issues, and the debates therein, also highlight the importance and the agency of the magazine, and of discursive contexts in general. According to Fish, interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but they are learned and they change. The site of enculturation, the place where interpretive strategies are learned and where membership in interpretive communities is acquired, is not in the work itself but in the discursive contexts that structure our interaction with them. What is at stake in arguments over interpretive paradigms is nothing short of the power to influence contemporary production. Within each AD profile, there are competing claims to historicize, to document and to interpret past and present architecture. However, the authors’ aims are not limited to establishing the most compelling historical account or the smartest take on contemporary work. Rather, they aim to redirect future work – to affect the interests and choices of architects reading AD, and ultimately to influence the course of architectural design culture. The message, as it turns out, is not only the medium, but also how we read it.

Notes 1 Robert Venturi’s citation of William Empson and T.S. Eliot, Charles Jencks’s utilization

of C.K. Ogden, Ferdinand de Saussure and C.S. Peirce, and Vincent Scully’s references to Harold Bloom are just a few indications of architecture’s reliance on and participation in broader intellectual trajectories, particularly linguistics and literary theory. 2 Andreas Papadakis (1938–2008) was a Cypriot-born British publisher. He founded

Academy Editions in 1967, a London-based publishing house specializing in architecture, art, design and the decorative arts. 3 Steve Parnell has closely examined the decades-long history of Architectural Design

magazine. For an account of the magazine’s postmodern years, see Steve Parnell, ‘AD and Post-Modern Architecture’, in Hilde Heynen, ed., Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of the European Architectural History Network: Brussels, 31 May–2 June 2012 (Brussels: Contactforum, 2012).

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4

Geoffrey Broadbent is a British architectural educator who taught at the universities of Manchester, Sheffield and Portsmouth, where is he now emeritus. His scholarship centred on design methodology, both at the architectural and urban scales.

5

Broadbent also had an essay entitled ‘Meaning into architecture’ in the 1969 Meaning in Architecture co-edited by Jencks with George Baird. G. Broadbent, ‘Meaning into architecture’, in C. Jencks and G. Baird, eds, Meaning in Architecture (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1969), 50–75.

6

Indeed, this was a topic that Broadbent pursued as a part of the work on what was to be a follow-up to his 1973 Design in Architecture; Architecture and the Human Sciences. This research produced two manuscripts, History of Designing in Architecture and Nature of Architectural Revolutions – neither of which was published.

7

Geoffrey Broadbent, ‘Neo-Classicism’, in Neo-classicism, AD Profile 23 (London: Architectural Design, 1980), 6.

8

Broadbent, ‘Neo-Classicism’, 6.

9

These followed his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, as well as two earlier guest-edited AD Profiles on Postmodernism: Profile 4, ‘Post-modernism’, published in volume 47, 4 (1977) and AD Profile 10, ‘Post-modern History’, published in volume 48, 1 (1978).

10 A recent article by Andrew Steen usefully parses the distinction between modern

eclecticism and radical eclecticism. While modern eclecticism saw postmodernists drawing on and remixing a variety of modernist influences, Jencks advocated radical eclecticism, which modelled itself after the particularly promiscuous late nineteenthcentury eclecticism while abandoning the few tenets of propriety that remained at that time to connect stylistic choice to building programme. See Andrew P. Steen, ‘Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture’, Fabrications 25, 1 (2015), 130–145. 11 Oswald Mathias Ungers, ‘Five Lessons from Schinkel and the Architecture Museum

in Frankfurt’, in Charles Jencks, ed., Free-Style Classicism (London: Architectural Design, 1982), 24. 12 Charles Jencks, Post-Modern Classicism: The New Synthesis, Architectural Design

Profile (London: Architectural Design, 1980), 10. 13 Charles Jencks, ‘Free-Style Classicism: The Wider Tradition’, in Charles Jencks, ed.,

Free-Style Classicism, Architectural Design Profile (London: Architectural Design, 1982), 18. 14 Demetri Porphyrios is a Greek architect and educator, and leads the London-based

architecture and urban design practice Porphyrios Associates. He earned a PhD from Princeton with a dissertation on Alvar Aalto that was later published as Sources of Modern Eclecticism: Studies on Alvar Aalto (London: Academy Editions, 1982). 15 Demetri Porphyrios, ‘Scandinavian Doricism: Danish and Swedish Architecture

1905–1930’, in Classicism is not a Style (London: Architectural Design, 1982), 31. 16 Porphyrios, ‘Scandinavian Doricism’, 29–31. 17 One interesting aspect of Porphyrios’s criticism of late nineteenth-century eclecticism

in this article is that it seems to respond to an earlier essay by Jencks, ‘Isozaki and

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Radical Eclecticism’, published in an earlier issue of AD in 1977, as well as to his arguments in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in which Jencks held up the period as a model or precursor to the eclecticism he advocated for the present. Andrew Steen notes that some form of propriety was still in effect in the late nineteenth century, in which historical styles were chosen according to the building’s use. Jencks argued for the abandonment of such regulations for an eclecticism that was, indeed, radical. Steen, ‘Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture’, 133. 18 Demetri Porphyrios, Classicism is not a Style (London: Architectural Design, 1982),

52–53. 19 Though Porphyrios doesn’t name it explicitly, these descriptors refer to Charles

Moore’s Piazza d’Italia (1978), which he viewed as a particularly egregious example of Postmodern architecture. Porphyrios, Classicism is not a Style, 53. 20 Porphyrios, Classicism is not a Style, 57. 21 Unfortunately, Karl Bötticher’s Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1844/1852) remains

untranslated from the German. A discussion of his conception of architecture as comprising the core-form and the art-form can be found in Kenneth Frampton, ‘Bötticher, Semper and the Tectonic: Core-form and Art-form’, in Andrew Ballantyne, ed., What is Architecture? (New York: Routledge, 2002), 138–152. 22 Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and

the Criticism of Language’, Oppositions 3 (1974), 37–62. It is highly likely that Porphryios would have been aware of this essay. Indeed, Manfrdo Tafuri contributed an essay to Classicism is not a Style, co-written with Georges Teyssot, entitled ‘Classical Melancholies.’ Reinhold Martin’s essay ‘The Return of the Classical: Some Archeological Fragments’ in Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010) situates ‘Classical Melancholies’ interestingly in terms of 1980s classical revivalism and its appropriation by the conservative Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and Britain. 23 These texts include Diana Agrest, ‘The Order of the City’, and Peter Eisenman,

‘A Critical Practice: American Architecture in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century’, in John Hejduk et al., eds, Education of an Architect: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union (New York: Rizzoli, 1988); Mario Gandelsonas, ‘On Reading Architecture: Eisenman and Graves: An Analysis’, Progressive Architecture 53 (1972), 68–88. 24 I am certainly not the first to apply reader-response theory to visual or spatial

phenomena. Wolfgang Kemp translated the theory to the reception of visual arts as early as 1992 in his essay (originally published in German and later translated into English) ‘The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, in Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith P.F. Moxey, eds, The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). More recently, John Dixon Hunt has utilized reception theory with respect to landscape in his The Afterlife of Gardens (London: Reaktion, 2004). Of primary relevance to this essay is Tim Gough, ‘Reception Theory of Architecture: Its Pre-History and Afterlife’, Architectural Theory Review: Journal of the Department of Architecture, The University of Sydney 18, 3 (2013), 279–292. Gough’s essay provides an instructive summary of reception theory, but unlike this essay which draws upon the synchronicity of reader-response

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and postmodernism to argue that reading was an important form of architectural engagement in this period, Gough imagines ‘what such an [architectural] theory might have looked like’ were one to have emerged out of literary reception theory, ultimately arguing that while reading might well describe the kind of interaction an historian or critic could have with a work, it does not describe ‘the everyday interplay that makes up the lives of buildings’. 25 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from

Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), ix. 26 Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the

Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 24. 27 Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, 25. 28 Iser, The Implied Reader, 9–10. 29 Stanley E. Fish, ‘Interpreting the “Variorum”’, Critical Inquiry 2, 3 (1976), 474. 30 Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, 31. 31 Iser, The Implied Reader, 34. 32 Reyner Banham, ‘The Writing on the Walls’, The Times Literary Supplement (London,

England), Issue 3998 (17 November 1978), 1337. Banham referred specifically to the collection of projects assembled by Jencks in his 1977 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

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10 POSTMODERN ARCHITECTS AS THEORISTS: THE CASE OF THE ESSAY COLLECTION (1988–1998) STÉPHANIE DADOUR

From the late 1980s, a proliferation of essay collections1 themed around the concepts of gender, sexuality and race appeared on the North American architectural scene. Typically edited by one, two or three people, these volumes assembled essays by a diversity of authors, presenting multiple approaches to a common theme. Most often (though not always), they arose from institutionally organized lectures, conferences or symposiums. Their editors and authors2 also initiated and participated in a range of other media, imagined as forums for theory in and around architecture: the journal Assemblage3 as well as exhibitions such as Queer Space (Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1994), The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (CooperHewitt, National Design Museum, 1993) and House Rules (Wexner Center for the Arts, 1994), are but a few examples of these platforms for the participation in intellectual exchanges, complementing lectures and teaching. The purpose of this paper is twofold. It takes as a case study essay collections published in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with concepts of gender, sexuality and race and analyses the nature and organization of this

This essay was translated from French by Colin MacWhirter thanks to the support of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble and Laboratoire Les Métiers de l’Histoire de l’Architecture.

publication format as a way to read and reflect on their respective scopes. First, it considers the essay collection as a format that elicits a postmodern reading, that is, a construction based on difference and discontinuity, which privileges a diversity of concepts, methods and contexts of enunciation, forming, in the manner of interdisciplinary studies,4 meeting places of heterogeneous knowledge. Such exchanges were not common in architecture, and it is clear that the texts of these collections sought above all to problematize points where modern certainties seemed at an impasse. Here the word ‘postmodern’ is understood not as a negation of modernity but rather as an affirmation of plurality, of interdisciplinarity, calling into question existing canons by decentring and challenging master narratives. In the first part, devoted to the format of the essay collection, three main elements will be considered: the structure of the volume, the selection of texts as well as the origins of their contents, and their contexts. The second part of this paper will serve to show that the proliferation of the essay collection reflects the emergence of a theoretical turn, in which architects redefined the representations of their persona and their discipline. The theoretical turn fostered the creation of a new identity, that of the theorist, and intended to deconstruct the foundations of architecture. Here ‘deconstruction’ does not correspond to what, in architecture, refers to the linguistic or semiotic analysis of the deconstructivists5 but to the theory of deconstruction as a critical position. In What is a Theorist?, Irit Rogoff, professor of visual culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, states that theory serves to question the discipline and practice: ‘Rather than the accumulation of theoretical tools and materials, models of analysis, perspectives and positions, the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.’6 Thus, it is not a question of deconstruction as an aesthetic architectural style, but rather as a position that oscillates between deconstruction in the philosophical sense7 – adopted in the United States for postmodern philosophy, and what historian of ideas François Cusset calls the ‘watchword of American postmodernity’8 – and architectural deconstruction understood as a sociopolitical project,9 that is to say, as a cultural criticism of architectural form.

Towards a postmodern reading: The essay collection as institutional format By their format and nature, essay collections have instilled a postmodern reading in architecture. Their form varies little: similar to collections from the humanities and social sciences (slightly larger than A5, and containing roughly 300 pages), they are seldom illustrated, and images that do appear are usually in

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black and white. Those images vary in nature depending on the purpose of the text: architectural drawings, photographs, screenshots, archival material. The first pages of content, whether preface or introduction, justify the publication of the book, the selection of essays and the order in which they appear. More rarely an epilogue, followed by a comprehensive bibliography, closes the book. After each essay, there are endnotes and sometimes a bibliography. The essays are occasionally grouped into sections or placed chronologically and can be read individually or together, insisting on shifting and unstable relationships and meanings on an identical topic. The essays’ length varies according to the collection but is roughly similar within the same book. This is much the same as with other scholarly collections. The pace and writing style of the essay collection constitute a kind of hybrid journal and book. In The Sex of Architecture, for example, the editors Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman explain that the book’s structure pairs certain essays to echo the dialogue format of the Inherited Ideologies conference, which was the basis of the publication, and also ‘to illuminate common themes running through a remarkably diverse body of work’. They continue, ‘Yet it is also possible to make these connections in different ways. For example, Bergren’s essay can as usefully be read with Ockman and Friedman on domesticity as with Boyer, Crawford, and Çelik on the city, or with Ingraham and McLeod on discourse’.10 The dislocated and fragmented content recalls the aesthetic of montage and collage, a typically modern technique, but of course also postmodern, as it aids comprehension of a complex reality. The collection retroactively constitutes a new production, at the same time rejecting hierarchy and the authoritarianism of one voice. Complementarities, contradictions and slippages encourage reflection on a theme rather than attempting to prove it. The editors defend the multiscalar, multi-referential and plural construction which depends on the loss of the certain, unique and universal. In these collections the editors privilege plurality and a variety of theoretical frameworks. They do not value a unique position, let alone a single approach or a single definition of identity. On the contrary, they bring together a multiplicity of positions and approaches that define identity from otherness and minority. These writers and their works manifest a recognition of the need to attend to so-called minority elements of American culture. Minorities are here understood as the excluded: ‘The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example … A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s a becoming, a process.’11 The modern quest for universality is criticized and replaced by a quest for cultural differences and the decentring of a dominant ‘self ’.12 Thus, contrary to the common idea in architecture that postmodernism died at the end of the 1980s, this paper would like to argue that essay collections and their lesser known and recognized content13 emerged as postmodern writings as defined by historian Barbara Epstein:

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Until sometime around the mid-eighties the term postmodernism was used to refer to different, though related, phenomena. In the narrowest sense it referred to trends in art and architecture; used more broadly it referred to social and cultural trends such as the fragmentation of social structures, organizations, and identities. In this broad cultural sense postmodernism also referred to the loss of a sense of connection between the past, the present, and the future; distrust of grand theories or ethical systems; a sense that the meanings that had once seemed firmly attached to things were draining away.14 Contributors to these essay collections usually came from different disciplines but shared an interest in space and architecture and the desire to relate architecture to identity politics, notably gender, sexuality and race. As noted by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, such essay collections brought together readers with diverse interests, ‘first from within architecture with an interest in gender; second from within gender studies with an interest in space and architecture, and third from within spatialised disciplines, such as geography and anthropology, with an interest in gender and in architecture’.15 Sexuality and Space was one of the first of these collections to introduce the approaches of various disciplines. Published following a symposium of the same title held at Princeton University in 1990, the essay collection was the first in a series of publications released by Princeton Papers on Architecture, chronicling the various activities of the school, and intending ‘to document discussions and images generally left out of the architectural mainstream’.16 Indeed, the engagement with gender issues as put forward by feminist theory and, subsequently, those of sexuality and race, occurred in the architectural field thirty years later than in other disciplines such as interdisciplinary studies, visual arts, literature and cinema, which from the 1970s had accepted and affirmed sociopolitical stances. Appearing in Sexuality and Space, Meagham Morris, Australian scholar of cultural studies, Laura Mulvey, British feminist movie theorist, Patricia White, scholar of feminist film, and Victor Burgin, artist and theorist of the image, to name just a few, demonstrated this desire to break disciplinary boundaries and redefine architecture. Most of these authors were from interdisciplinary studies departments which combine research currents that cross literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, social geography, film studies, feminism and history to deconstruct and analyse cultural systems. This desire to ‘seek new horizons’ demonstrates a subversive spirit compared to canonical anthologies of architecture theory published in the same period (that had in common a similar format), which did not incorporate writings from other disciplines, even when such texts had had a significant impact on the discipline. Indeed, the main difference between anthologies and essay collections resides in the nature of the texts. While anthologies include theoretical texts on architecture (mostly written by architects, but not always); essay collections are based on a variety of texts, interested in space, but not necessarily on and about architecture

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per se. Anthologies reinforce the idea of architectural canonical texts, whereas essay collections open up the spectrum of texts allowing to think architecture. The resistance to theory in architecture is often framed as a resistance to an invading outside force. Whether in reaction to Robert Venturi’s interest in literary criticism or to the impact of paraliterary figures such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, architecture has addressed theory with xenophobia. Most of these anthologies dampen the impact of texts by authors such as Michel Foucault or Jürgen Habermas, even though these authors can be said to have had the deepest transformative effects on architecture discourse.17 The traditional anthology, which was the format recognized and legitimized in the architecture scene and that become very popular by the mid-1990s,18 featured one editor gathering into one book articles written by various authors in different circumstances on a specific discipline: architecture, whereas the essay collection presented texts written as responses to a call for papers – whether at a conference, symposium or otherwise – from various disciplinary fields and not necessarily focusing on architecture per se. Unlike those anthologies that sought to establish a canon,19 the essay collections were intended to open and expand the spectrum of discussion and admit diverse approaches on the same subject (but not within one discipline). These exchanges between architecture and the construction of knowledge drawn from interdisciplinary studies also reveal a tendency toward postmodernism, in which interpretation is valued more than explanation. As historian Stéphane Van Damme put it, this may give the impression ‘of knowledge that seems at once everywhere and nowhere’.20 This ‘anti-discipline’ is meant above all to maintain incredulity toward metanarratives,21 the defining criterion of the postmodern condition, according to Lyotard. This interdisciplinarity gives rise to a critical confrontation involving an arsenal of approaches, theories, concepts and constructions of the object, belonging to American critical theory, that allow overlapping associations and exchanges, challenging the impermeability of each discipline. Diachronic exploration is abandoned in favour of synchronic connections, and gradually historical connections give way. François Cusset describes the American adoption of French Theory22 as ‘the chance encounter between a recent British Marxist apparatus and a French theoretical umbrella, in the arena of American leisure culture’.23 For Patricia Morton and Paulette Singley, this period was ‘a site of liberation, intellectual freedom, and class empowerment. In its quasidialectical mode, the periphery was the centre, surfaces were deep, and ornament was structure. All of the groups formerly excluded from power were given voices and tools with which to operate’.24 Thus, aside from the difficulty of clarifying their respective terms and usages, these dialogues and collaborations between architects and researchers reject any hierarchy of knowledge.

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With the strength of a corpus of imported methods and tools, these essay collections produced by young architecture researchers and professors were published mainly in an East Coast academic context,25 particularly at Ivy League universities like Princeton and Columbia, while on the West Coast, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and UC Berkeley were the settings for discussion and reading groups initiated by feminist architects. Among participants who had studied architecture, very few practised; instead, they considered themselves theorists and historians, with close ties to the academy and their status as among the first to obtain doctorates in architecture.26 They held institutional positions, and it was primarily in the areas of education and publication that they collaborated, were invited to speak, and found ways to exchange thought. Often the same names reappeared and were active in the theoretical journals founded at that time, such as Assemblage (1985), ANY magazine (1993) and Harvard Design Magazine (1997). The editors of the essay collections articulated their positions in various institutions without ever representing or forming an identifiable group. It was more a case of a number of individuals linked together in a kind of network or of a generation whose contours were blurred – a condition appropriate to the postmodern distrust of a society structured as hierarchical, pyramidal and unitary. In introducing concepts from other disciplines, the authors of these essay collections were trying to integrate themselves into the architectural institution, into the system. By conforming to normative procedures, that is, by participating in existing institutional structures such as universities, publishing houses and journals, these scholars were able to form a system within the existing system, and to introduce the possibility of transgressing normative discourse within the architectural field, a transgression of identity that sought to renew the normative model by breaching its established boundaries. These essay collections constituted a forum for these young architects who contacted and collaborated with each other on different aspects of architecture, and who were marked by means of a format recognized and legitimized outside the field of architecture while offering to the architectural field a new discursive practice. They did not discuss the hegemonic discourse of architecture to oppose it, but rather to penetrate and change it from within. This period marked the formation of a generational consciousness which imposed, unlike its predecessors, a discursive practice from inside the institution (mainly universities and publishing houses). The rise of theory within this professional discipline was related, among other things, to other architects’ abandonment of the sociopolitical in the 1980s,27 to the emergence of doctoral programmes in architecture and, more broadly, to the attempts in many disciplines to rewrite history in light of post-colonialism, identity theories, theories of globalization and the appropriation of French post-structuralist writings, all of which were very prominent at the time. At this point, the association between transgression (in this case, the transgression of architectural norms and also the introduction of exchanges of

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knowledge from other disciplines) and institution (the publishers and the writers’ status) was no longer a paradox. Instead, it appeared indicative of a postmodern practice driving what could be called art-for-the-museum-against-the-museum. Continuing the Institutional Critique, after the end of the comfortable 1980s, an elite architectural and publishing scene claimed to be a place of permissiveness and encouraged supposedly self-critical productions. Inevitably, the question of credibility arises regarding the critiques of the institution that these essay collections presented and even demanded. The critical activity of the 1960s and 1970s first disseminated in journals and exhibitions was then spread more widely by way of collection of essays in the 1980s and 1990s, providing a new forum in architecture for institutionalized discursive productions. The essay collection was adopted by architects as both a tool and a product of postmodernism to contemplate shared ideas, to exchange methods and approaches from different disciplines, to operate within a network of people (rather than setting an editorial committee, as with a journal) and to transgress the norms of the institution. Finally, these writings reveal professors, historians, theorists and practitioners asserting an intellectual position. They adopted the idea of decentring. More specifically, they sought to critique the norms and hegemony of the middle-class-white-heterosexual-male, the figure idealized in architecture, and they sought to problematize and to relativize conventions, to call into question their own assumptions that had once appeared universal and canonical.

Theory in architecture: The text as expression and representation of postmodern deconstruction During the 1980s, cultural exchanges, translations and importations of books and texts gave rise to specifically American interpretations of theory, which shake the intelligentsia, as explained by historian of ideas, François Cusset: In other words, if Derrida or Foucault deconstructed the concept of objectivity, the Americans would draw on those theories not for reflection on the figural power of language or on discursive constructions, but for a more concrete political conclusion: objectivity is synonymous with ‘subjectivity of the white male’. What they developed was an entirely unexpected link between literary theory and the political Left. Following the anarcho-poetic textualism of the seventies, and alongside the literary purism of Derrida’s Yale followers, the conservative revolution of the Reagan years provoked the return of the repressed: the notorious referent, evacuated by these formalistic

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versions of French theory, made a sudden comeback under the name of identity politics.28 In this process of decentring, architects assembled a lexicon from theories as diverse as those of the Frankfurt School, multicultural studies, gender studies and French Theory, as well as concepts used in the French social sciences and humanities, and adapted them for an architectural context to expose power relations and introduce critical readings of society. The writers in these essay collections shared an intention to analyse the meaning and nature of oppression, and to understand the infiltration of power. Writing in the early 1990s, their positions and approaches were by no means unanimous, and these architects, theorists and critics acknowledged and challenged homogeneity, normativity and the domination of the discourse of the middle-class, heterosexual white male. They collaborated on the construction of a discourse based on shared struggles against domination, oppression and injustice, to reconstruct and redefine logocentric and ethnocentric canons, and to rewrite history. They wanted recognition, rights and fulfilment while rejecting hierarchical structures and patriarchy; they sought to remove the hegemony of the middle-class, heterosexual white male by critiquing its systems of values and modes of oppression. In 1992, in one of the essays published in Sexuality and Space, Mark Wigley noted that discrimination and gender divisions are found throughout architecture discourse, ‘in its rituals of legitimation, hiring practices, classification systems, lecture techniques, publicity images, canon formation, division of labour, bibliographies, design conventions, legal codes, salary structures, publishing practices, language, professional ethics, editing protocols, project credits, etc’.29 For Wigley, these identity-forming phenomena in their relationships to the other are not perceived as architectural subjects, but as concepts external to the discipline. The gesture was not to reach Outside of architecture to the Other, but to locate the other Inside … The question of deconstruction is never very far away from the question of the Other … It was more about the drawing of lines, so if a line is drawn between the Inside and the Outside, between what is proper and what is external, between what is at home and what is alien. For me the inevitable instinct was to demonstrate that the alien is Inside and not Outside.30 Wigley was conscious of using the same vocabulary when speaking of deconstruction (as defined in the 1988 exhibition), but did not dwell so much on formal deconstruction as on an examination of social, sexual, gendered and cultural constructs in the architectural field. He pointed out that minority issues, those related to gender, sexuality and race, are not new, and they have always existed within the architectural field. The innovation lies in how to deal with them, to develop them, to conceptualize and theorize them from within the system itself.31

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In most of the essay collections the development of identity categories occurs through the (de)construction of representations, the creation of a critique of social and political life. For cultural theorist Stuart Hall, ‘Representation through language is therefore central to the processes by which meaning is produced’,32 and taken in the absolute or visual sense it gives meaning to the object to which it refers at two levels of representation and its constitutive system; ‘representation is conceived as entering into the very constitution of things; and thus culture is conceptualized as a primary or “constitutive” process, as important as the economic or material “base” in shaping social subjects and historical events – not merely a reflection of the world after the event’.33 In the architectural field, the object of theory is no longer related only to the cultural and disciplinary palette to which architects will turn to conceive and design a project, but rather to representations of the project, based on new levels of reading and analysis. In the notes to the introductory pages to her essay ‘Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, Beatriz Colomina observes that, ‘The perception of space is not what space is but one of its representations; in this sense built space has no more authority than drawings, photographs, or descriptions.’34 This position is not limited to the published collection of essays but is a more substantial process involving different architectural formats, notably including the journal Assemblage, as expressed by one of its editors, K. Michael Hays: Criticism through representations: it seems a potent premise for returning contemporary architecture to its social engagements … And if an understanding of the affiliations between representational systems and structures of power has expanded our conception of architecture’s domain and responsibilities, these projects have, for the most part, remained remarkably silent on specific questions of power, class, gender, and the actual experiences of subjects in contemporary society.35 Basing their work on representation, many architectural theorists demanded the profession be more open, less focused on built forms, and that it embrace a diversity of practices (teaching, publishing, research, etc.); they stressed the need for layered readings and a diverse and nuanced vocabulary, a plurality of narratives and historical texts, to eventually deconstruct them all and reveal architecture’s intrinsic power relations. The intellectual positions of these architects encouraged the adoption of theories rather than a singular interest in the specific attributes of architecture, its programme, its uses or its construction. In this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary moment, architects as theorists made a claim for architecture as a cultural and critical practice. In this perspective, the essay collection encourages an interdisciplinary approach with a proliferation of theory, in which the translation of discursive practices onto the architectural object, that is, the design and construction of buildings, seems impossible. Indeed,

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theory is – for them – not about a common baggage which allows architects to organize, think and design. Making theory was to recognize the building as a representation and not a representational projection of reality. In this context and as explained by K. Michael Hays, this new theoretical activity required rethinking architecture. ‘This new activity of theory demanded not new buildings, but the invention of altogether new techniques for thinking architectural concepts and discursive relations.’ The aim was to overthrow the autonomy claimed by the adherents of the Oppositions generation,36 to valorize the fact that architecture is both autonomous and heteronomous, and to recognize that it is a dialectical relationship where what used to be called the socio-historical context of architectural production (which Tafuri and Rowe see as architecture’s limiting condition) as well as the object produced are both themselves texts (call them constructions if you don’t like ‘texts’), in the sense that we cannot approach them separately and directly, as distinct, unrelated things-in-themselves, but only through their prior differentiation and transmutation. The world is a totality; it is an essential and essentially linguistic problem of theory to describe this totality.37 Finally, these architectural theorists take the opportunity to introduce new readings to better demarcate their positions.

The end of theory in architecture In the North American architecture milieu, the 1990s were marked by the use of a new publishing format, the essay collection, fostering a critique of the discipline. While the architectural traditional journals and exhibitions enabled architects to articulate and promote their positions, these collections functioned as postmodern laboratories of discourse. They were also the preferred format for postmodern exchanges, as in between identity politics and architecture. By 2000, the proliferation of American essay collections had subsided. That year, Assemblage no. 41 marked the end of the publication; it was time for a break, time for [self-]assessment in the East Coast architectural scene of the United States. According to Beatriz Colomina, a journal cannot continue forever and its influence must come to an end at some point, yielding space for the next generation.38 Meanwhile, the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, then under the direction of Joan Ockman, held a workshop on the schism between theory and architectural practice. This split, which first appeared in the 1960s, had transformed architecture theory into an autonomous discipline, independent of the built environment, according to Ockman. While the writings of Tafuri and the French post-structuralists may have

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furthered this position, the resurgence of pragmatism in architecture at the turn of the twenty-first century, as in other disciplines, seems to spur the questioning and renewal of a utopian imagination, which, in Ockman’s view, was a necessary development. From the early 2000s onwards architects have asserted the importance of a pragmatic architectural practice and its position against the intellectualization of the discipline within academe. Ironically, in 2007 the collection The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader was published, in which appeared several definitions of ‘pragmatism’, with some contributors advocating for a pragmatic theory, as Ockman had done, and others, notably Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, attempting to discredit critical theory. Architecture is by definition a practice, yet its pragmatism has nevertheless been vindicated in both professional and academic circles. Pragmatism thus appears as a paradigm of renewal within the architectural milieu of the twenty-first century. The 1980s architecture theory will not have necessarily guided practice, but regardless will have contaminated the autonomy of architecture, questioned and critiqued it.

Notes 1 Sexuality and Space (symposium at Princeton in 1990, publication in 1992);

Architecture: In Fashion (symposium at Princeton in 1991, publication in 1994); The Sex of Architecture (conference in Pennsylvania in 1995, publication in 1996); The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (1996); Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (from meetings held in 1994 at Princeton, publication in 1996); Angles of Incidence (1992); Architecture and Feminism (originally conceived as the Yale Journal of Architecture and Feminism, publication in 1996); Architecture of the Everyday (an inquiry of interest beginning about 1987 at Yale, publication in 1997); Design and Feminism (conference titled Re-Visioning Design and Technology at CUNY in 1995, publication in 1999); Women in the Practice of Architecture (lecture series at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998). 2 To mention a few architects: Deborah Berke, Jennifer Bloomer, Beatriz Colomina,

Steven Harris, Mary McLeod, Mark Robbins, Joel Sanders, Henry Urbach, Mark Wigley. 3 Assemblage was founded in 1986 in the wake of the group Re Visions and at the end

of the journal Oppositions. The editors of Assemblage, K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, describe it as a journal and a group project. Cf. K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, ‘Introduction’, Assemblage 41 (April 2000), 3. 4 The term ‘interdisciplinary studies’ refers to American university programmes,

starting in the 1960s and 1970s, that set themselves apart from traditional disciplines by offering instead a transversal, multidisciplinary approach. Such programmes were most often constructed around an identity, as in African-American Studies or Women’s Studies, or a thematic theoretical field, such as Cultural Studies (imported from Britain) and Visual Studies.

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5

The exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at MoMA in 1988 brought together various projects under the label ‘deconstructivist’.

6

Irit Rogoff, ‘What Is a Theorist’, in Was ist ein Kunstler, Munich, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en [accessed 24 May 2017].

7

The term was first used by Heidegger [Destruktion] but taken up and systematized by Jacques Derrida in De la grammatologie/Of Grammatology.

8

François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 113.

9

Cf. Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism’, Assemblage 8 (Fall 1989), 22–59.

10 Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman, ‘Introduction’, in The Sex

of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 13. 11 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio

Negri’, Futur Antérieur 1 (Spring 1990), 235. http://www.generation-online.org/p/ fpdeleuze3.htm [accessed 24 May 2017]; Gilles Deleuze, ‘Contrôle et devenir. Entretien avec Toni Negri’, in Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 235. 12 In Thomas McEvilley, Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, NY:

Documentext/McPherson, 1992), 153–158. McEvilley recognizes in this moment a call to the limits of the discourse of values in Western philosophy from Plato (universal objectivity, the eye of the soul) and Kant (universal subjectivity, the power of judgement or aesthetic judgement). 13 In the anthologies published at the end of the 1990s, none or very few of these

writings have been reprinted. See on this subject Sylvia Lavin, ‘Theory into History; Or, the Will to Anthology’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historian 58, 3 (September 1999), 494–499 and Karen Burns, ‘A Girl’s Own Adventure: Gender in the Contemporary Architectural Theory Anthology’, Journal of Architectural Education 65, 2 (March 2012), 125–134. 14 Barbara Epstein, ‘Why Poststructuralism Is a Dead End for Progressive Thought’,

Socialist Review 25, 2 (1995), 92. 15 Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, eds, Gender Space Architecture. An

Interdisciplinary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2000). 16 Ralph Lerner, ‘Preface’, in Beatriz Colomina and Jennifer Bloomer, eds, Sexuality and

Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). 17 Lavin, ‘Theory into History; Or, the Will to Anthology’, 495. 18 I am referring here specifically to Kate Nesbitt’s Theorizing a New Agenda for

Architecture, K. Michael Hays’s Architecture Theory Since 1968, Charles Jencks’s Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture and Neil Leach’s Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. 19 ‘“Anthology,” in contrast, is from the Greek word for “collection of flowers,” a term

implying selection. The very format of an anthology prompts canon formation,

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for while a miscellany invites short, disconnected readings, an anthology invites prolonged study. Anthologies convey the notion of evolution (the succession of literary movements) and hierarchy (the recognition of masterpieces). They create and reform canon, establish literary reputations, and help institutionalize the national culture, which they reflect’. Barbara Mujica, ‘Canon, Controversy, and the Literary Anthology’, Hispania 80, 2 (May 1997), 203–204. 20 ‘[D]’un savoir qui semble à la fois partout et nulle part’. Stéphane Van Damme,

‘Comprendre les Cultural Studies: une approche d’histoire des savoirs’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51-4bis (2004–2005), 53. 21 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 22 For François Cusset there is a group of about a dozen writers, associated with the

designation French Theory, ‘whose American admirers and French opponents tend to group them into a school of thought and a unified movement’ and whose rapprochements correspond to the ‘critique of the subject, of representation, and of historical continuity, a threefold reading of Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and the critique of “critique” itself, since all of them interrogate in their own way the German philosophical tradition’. Cusset, French Theory, 8–9. 23 Cusset, French Theory, 133. 24 Patricia Morton and Paulette Singley, ‘The 1990s: A Theoretical Post Mortem’, ArcCA

8, 1 (2008), 27–29. 25 Van Damme traces the evolution of the visibility of these research fields in journals,

meta-sites and publishers, presenting a list of twenty-three publishers, mainly universities and North American, that have developed collections in Cultural Studies, including Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and New York University. Van Damme, ‘Comprendre les Cultural Studies’, 51–52. 26 In the United States in the mid-1970s, because of a growing interest in history in

architectural pedagogy, PhD programmes in architectural history were established, first at MIT and Cornell, then at Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. Bruno Zevi, Stanford Anderson, Henry Million, Alexander Tzonis, Anthony Vidler, Manfredo Tafuri, Kenneth Frampton and Kurt Foster were the founders of these programmes. 27 Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to

Deconstructivism’, Assemblage 8 (February 1989), 23–59; Mary McLeod, ‘Everyday and “Other” Spaces’, in Feminism and Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 1–7. 28 Cusset, French Theory, 131. 29 Mark Wigley, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’, in Sexuality and Space, 329. 30 Interview with Mark Wigley, 14 April 2011. 31

Interview with Mark Wigley, 14 April 2011.

32 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London:

Sage Publications), 1. 33 Hall, Representation, 5–6.

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34 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, in Sexuality and Space, 75, n. 3. 35 K. Michael Hays, ‘Editorial’, Assemblage 5 (February 1988), 5. 36 The Oppositions generation is recognized as an achitectural elite concentrated in New

York who became known through the publication of the journal Oppositions (1973), attached to the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS). Cf. K. Michael Hays, Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). 37 K. Michael Hays and Catherine Ingraham, ‘Editorial, On Turning Thirty’, Assemblage

30 (August 1996), 8. 38 Interview with Beatriz Colomina, 6 June 2012.

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Part IV

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE AND THE INSTITUTION: BETWEEN THE ELITE AND THE PUBLIC

11 INSTITUTIONALIZING POSTMODERNISM: RECONCEIVING THE JOURNAL AND THE EXHIBITION AT THE INSTITUTE FOR ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN STUDIES IN 1976 KIM FÖRSTER

Making its mark as the international centre for debate, the New York-based Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) (founded in 1967 and closed in 1985), which liked to see itself along the lines of avant-garde schools of architecture such as the Architectural Association in London or Cooper Union in New York, throughout its short-lived career of eighteen years thought of itself as one of the last refuges of modernist architecture. It did so with an overarching sense of mission, not only aesthetically but at times also socially, as exemplified by the urban research and design projects of its early years. Yet the IAUS underwent a rapid evolution, eventually contributing to the institutionalization of postmodernism in North America and abroad. With a strong focus on influencing (and eventually commodifying) education and culture, the IAUS, if considered in the expanded field of cultural production, serves as a case to verify the belief in architecture and authorship as mediated through modern formats of expression, the avant-garde journal and exhibition. Drawing from cultural and discursive analysis, collective biography and institutional critique, I argue that

the Institute’s fellows, when seen as cultural producers – e.g. journal editors and exhibition curators – were able to produce new values and meanings, as they as a group were able to create new social and institutional networks as symbolic and economic systems.1 In architecture history, the story of the IAUS as an incubator for architecture theory has been repeatedly reiterated, as it has been primarily remembered for its publications, notably the journal Oppositions, and Oppositions Books.2 However, the founding narratives of the Institute, especially its organizational set-up, might have explained the rise of postmodernism as new cultural logic in New York’s highly networked architecture circles; from the very outset, it had already established a strong affiliation with the Museum of Modern Art. In a short time the IAUS, as a new kind of extra-academic organization, thrived under the direction of the young Peter Eisenman, to draw upon different networks of people and institutions, their labour and knowledge. Officially charted as an educational facility that held status as a non-profit association from its very beginning, the IAUS at the start offered graduate and postgraduate students practical experience as they were given the chance to work on real projects. In this endeavour to revalorize the discipline, Eisenman closely collaborated with Cornell University’s school of architecture and others. With funds from the Graham Foundation, he succeeded in forming a group of peers around him, at one point including Emilio Ambasz, Kenneth Frampton, Joseph Rykwert, Anthony Vidler, Stanford Anderson, Mario Gandelsonas and Diana Agrest. This development led to the acquisition of major urban planning and design projects on behalf of public authorities, e.g. the lucrative Streets project for the US Department for Housing and Urban Development, which financed its representative premises. This first phase of publicly funded projects ended in 1973, shortly after the IAUS had been commissioned by the New York State Urban Development Corporation to realize a new housing prototype that Frampton had designed, which was communicated to the general public in an extraordinary exhibition on low-rise alternatives at the MoMA.3 Evidently, in the mid-1970s, the IAUS increasingly invested in cultural production. The Institute’s fellows, acting as guest-editors for single magazine issues, as coordinators of conferences or travelling exhibitions, and through their lectures series, engaged in the renewed debate on architecture’s autonomy. In their personal research, next to the Institute’s common projects, they drew upon theories borrowed from postmodern philosophy and literary studies, linguistics and semiotics.4 Acknowledging the disciplinary function and historical relevance of architecture books and avant-garde journals the Institute’s direction began to invest in publications and other media. Oppositions, launched in 1973 and envisioned as ‘a journal of criticism and ideas’, soon became the flagship of the Institute, allowing the intellectually ambitious fellows and hand-selected external authors to make a name for themselves as a new generation of historians, theorists and critics, in the end distancing themselves from traditional modes of the

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profession. Individual contributions promoted architecture as a work of art, while others even now called for sociopolitical relevance. They returned to the modern masters and their heroic masterpieces, considering them as either predecessors or role models, ruminating and remixing their ideas and methods.5 Thereafter, and due to available cultural funding for the arts and humanities, the IAUS became both the originator and venue of discursive events, in multiple ways mediating postmodernism, less artistic style than cultural phenomenon in architecture.6

Towards a sociology of architecture as cultural production When, in 1973, the new US government under President Richard Nixon issued a moratorium on federal subsidy programmes for public housing, the IAUS’s work changed drastically as a result of this conservative backlash in American politics and society. Given the new political and socio-economic conditions and constraints of New York’s financial and fiscal crisis that followed, and bereft of a possibility to actually build, the IAUS needed to reinvent and reposition itself to even survive. The creativity of the Institute’s fellows and the flexibility of its organizational structure were key in succeeding: first as an alternative architecture school, then as an event and exhibition space popular with the local architecture and art scene and supported by professionals, and finally as a internal publishing house. While architects in New York found themselves in a precarious situation, the Institute, because of the manifold activities of its fellows stressing immaterial over material labour, acted as a powerful agent for a particular kind of postmodernism. It mediated grand narratives for writing the history of architectural modernism, while putting forward new postmodern theory. In addition to the French school of institutional critique, I will mainly refer here to contemporary social theories of society and culture, to gain insights into the processes of position-taking by journals and exhibitions, and, above all, degrees of institutionalization.7 In particular, I rely on Pierre Bourdieu, applying the analysis and terminology that he developed with regard to the sociology of art and literature in terms of networks of cultural production and the market of symbolic goods, valorizing the individual producer and his or her work.8 The notion of ‘immaterial labour’ as developed in the context of the Italian ‘Operaismo’ to some degree is insightful here, too, as the fellows produced new symbols, affects and relations among them and with externals.9 Although it successfully defied institutionalization, i.e. to turn into a ‘real’ institution, a reading of the IAUS as a constituent part of the reforming educational system and developing publishing landscape in North America shows that it operated, in Bourdieu’s words, as an ‘agent of production and diffusion’, a self-appointed institution of consecration

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and legitimization, comparable to established authorities such as the ‘academies’ and the ‘museums’, and traditionally the ‘reviews’ and ‘galleries’. A closer look at two of the Institute’s cultural productions of 1976, the publishing of its journal and the organization of a group show in the style of Paris’s salon des refusés, provides insights into how Eisenman interpreted his role as ‘publisher’ and architectural ‘impresario’ highlighting the change happening at and through the Institute.10 The IAUS, in an era when cultural logic took hold, made use of both the journal and the exhibition as instruments for distinction and difference; yet, as they linked these classical sub-fields of restricted production to the diversifying publishing and art markets, both media can also be revisited and re-read as elements of a globalizing and successively economized architecture culture. In what follows, I will focus on two formats developed at the IAUS in the academic year 1976–7, which found a place in architecture history and might best be explained by developments in the market for scholarly publications and by transformations in the landscape of museums and galleries: first, Oppositions, which in 1976, since it was taken up by MIT Press as professional publisher, became academically legitimized; second, the group show Idea as Model which went on display at the end of 1976 and was originally conceived as an exhibition of conceptual, or – to put it another way – neo-avant-garde architecture.11 Subsequently, at the IAUS and in the field of architecture in general, both the journal and the exhibition took on a new meaning and significance in terms of how architecture, knowledge and power relate.

Publishing: Ideas or criticism Oppositions, as stated by its founding editors Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton and Mario Gandelsonas in the early editorials, was branded by unique discursive constructions. With its striking retro-modern graphic design, the journal proceeded to become the Institute’s major and long-term contribution to architecture history.12 Yet, the assertion of Oppositions as medium for the production, reproduction and dissemination of architecture knowledge was made possible by the contract between the IAUS and MIT Press. After some negotiations, both partners signed an agreement in April 1976 from which they both benefited. Taking account of the group of subscribers, students, institutions and architects that the IAUS brought into the contract, the deal with MIT Press ensured professional production, advertisements and worldwide distribution for their journal. Moreover, the IAUS was able to build upon an excellent international reputation as the theoretical and historiographical texts, published in the journal, were now consecrated by an academic publisher. Roger Conover, on the other hand, who had just started as Head of the Architecture Division at MIT Press in 1976, gained – through the IAUS – instant access to potential authors in New York’s self-reflecting architectural circles. What is more, the formation of the

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contract entailed more professional editorial work managed by Julia Bloomfield, and copy-editing with the addition of Joan Ockman. To meet the contractual agreements of four issues per year, the original editorial team, with Eisenman, Frampton and Gandelsonas somehow engaged otherwise, was supplemented by Anthony Vidler, who worked on an issue on Parisian urbanism. Other textual work, e.g. translations and proofreading, however, was mainly accomplished by students, interns and graduates of the IAUS, as there was still hardly any budget. An initial step towards professionalizing the journal was Oppositions 5 (Figure 11.1), with an increased print run of 3,000 and price of $6.13 The ‘Italian

FIGURE 11.1 Cover of Oppositions 5, the ‘Italian Issue’, published in October 1976 by MIT Press. Source: private library.

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Issue’, as the editors branded it, hit the market in October 1976 and served as evidence of the their interests and ambitions to internationalize American architecture culture and to intellectualize it. This first publication with MIT Press clearly underlined the new claim for future issues: to push not only the North American debate, but also engage in a transatlantic dialogue, with contributions primarily by Spanish and Italian authors.14 Already in the ‘Oppositions’ section, the issue included outstanding contributions:15 first, a pioneering review by Rafael Moneo on Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy, which was formative and representative of the postmodern condition as the postmodern sensibility, valorized by architectural drawings and exclusively printed on a black glossy paper; and second, a recent criticism by Manfredo Tafuri of projects of each of the ‘New York Five’, with which the Marxist historian and critic took up his linguistic-semiotic reading of postmodern language games in European and American architecture, introduced by a heroic collage of the protagonists, as a farewell to the ‘Whites’.16 With hindsight, Oppositions, then committed to the pressures of a regular production and meeting the sales figures, was a truly postmodern publication. Anything but a small magazine, yet precarious in terms of production and employment, the journal turned out to be epoch-making and should be read within a complex economy of attention. The fifth issue already attested to two editorial and textual strategies that became characteristic of the journalistic and editorial practice at the IAUS: Eisenman as editor jumped on trends already established abroad, e.g. embracing the work of Rossi, who was not well known in America by then, but whose fictional drawings of the analogous city were exhibited twice at the IAUS, after 1976 again in 1979, coining the architect’s reception abroad;17 and yet Oppositions incorporated critical, quite crucial voices in contemporary debate, e.g. the essays of Tafuri, who became the author most frequently published in the journal.18 When the release of Oppositions 5 was celebrated at the Institute in October 1976, this testified to a profound change in the institutional selfconception and identity. The ‘Forum’, as the journal’s invitation-only release party, designed as a scholarly panel discussion, was misleadingly called, was once again dedicated to Aldo Rossi, kicking off a genuine media-hype, and the Italian architect subsequently became a regular at the IAUS. A documentation and review of the event was published in the next issue, mixing in-house criticism with glamorous photographs of the cocktail party that followed the discussion. Thus, with the MIT deal, both the publications and events at the IAUS started to serve a more and more diversified public, and highlighted the IAUS’s image as meeting point of the international architecture intelligentsia. Once again, the Institute as educational and cultural space took advantage from the fact that all of its activities were connected to one another, and often understood as the commitment to architecture as a discipline. Crossfinanced by its recently introduced educational programmes (Undergraduate

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Program, Internship Program, Program in Preservation and Adaptive Re-Use, and High-School Program), the IAUS organized public programmes (as well as release parties and panel discussions also lectures, workshops, screenings, exhibitions, openings, conferences, receptions, etc.) and submitted to the cultural imperative of what Bourdieu had theorized as ‘the market of a symbolic economy’, based on a competitive logic.19 While the Institute and its fellows nearly monopolized the discussion in New York and beyond with a new kind of contemporary intellectual and artistic practice, Oppositions became the medium for international dissemination, building up reputation, prominence and fame for single editors and authors. A significant feature of this transition from modernism to postmodernism in architecture culture – in discursive, institutional, economic and political terms – has been the operationalization of architecture history and theory re-evaluating the role of the discipline and profession in relation to society. In North America, somewhat differently than in Europe, this shift was rhetorically underlined by the assertion of an ‘autonomy’ and ‘criticality’ of architecture, demonstrated impressively in the editorials published in Oppositions 4–7. Written individually, these texts are to be read as personal manifestos: Frampton’s ‘On Heidegger’ followed by Gandelsonas’s ‘Neo-Functionalism’, Eisenman’s ‘Post-Functionalism’ and, finally, Vidler’s ‘A Third Typology’.20 All of them were powerfully eloquent polemics, which resorted to very different kinds of reflections whether they were based on the approaches of the Frankfurt School or French Theory, German philosophy or CIAM ideology, structuralism or post-structuralism, meditating about the underlying conditions and meanings, histories and theories, concepts and methods, built projects and textual references of contemporary practice. Together, these editorials, written in accordance with the dichotomous principle of juxtaposition and of internal competition among the editors, represented the IAUS’s voice. However, they formed a self-sufficient, even self-serving discussion round. As the editors had almost all gained a foothold in the academy, they utilized the pages of Oppositions to display their sophistication, and present themselves as architectural equivalents of the 1970s generation of New York intellectuals.21 The individual editorials, then, in terms of linguistic interference and theoretical terminology, are only one example of how the IAUS attracted attention – its acronym increasingly used as a new brand – through the management of architecture knowledge, i.e. administering the handling and control of information. Although the editors had repeatedly stated to the contrary, the IAUS presented itself as a prime proponent of postmodernist thought and practice by introducing newly constructed criteria and conditions for the perception and appreciation of contemporary architecture and by suggesting poetic, at times reduced and misguided, readings of history and theory, that despite their stilted jargon and clumsy translations were appropriated and operationalized to eventually in the 1980s form the basis for iconic, sculptural projects.

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Exhibiting: Models, rather than ideas The second cultural product under examination is the exhibition Idea as Model, which was on display at the Institute from 16 December 1976 to 14 January 1977.22 According to the initial call for contributions, the event, more than others promoting the postmodernization and concurrent de-realization of architecture, aimed at emphasizing the intrinsic logic of architectural models vis-à-vis the representational mode of drawings, as the original idea was to publicly display models’ conceptual pluralities and communicative qualities.23 The IAUS’s second group show, conceived by Peter Eisenman and organized by Andrew MacNair, contained design, working and execution models of varying qualities. Eisenman had invited his peers, i.e. the Institute’s practising fellows, former members of the illustrious group Five Architects, and other New York architects to compare their conceptual strengths.24 Idea as Model perfected strategies of cultural variety, applied at the Institute: since 1974, the lecture series simply titled ‘Architecture’ programmatically integrated history, theory and design and opened architecture up to the arts, while the new Director of Development, Frederieke Taylor, approached architectural offices as potential sponsors. Turning former collaborative efforts rhetorically into competitive rivalry, Idea as Model was at least based on the shared belief that the architectural model, usually an instrument of design and communication, could be seen as a medium in its own right. However, due to the special exhibition format, primarily made by producers for producers, this obvious manifestation of the new generation of New York-based architects as a self-contained circle reproduced the dichotomy of bourgeois vs. avant-garde art. As a group production, Idea as Model ensured that all exhibiting architects came together in a seemingly objective contest for legitimacy. At this juncture, the IAUS, with the exhibition, responded to recent productions at the MoMA, which had previously held two crucial exhibitions: Architectural Studies and Projects (13 March to 15 May 1975), a small exhibition presented in the penthouse cafeteria of the MoMA,25 and The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts (October 1975 to January 1976), curated by Arthur Drexler and presented in the main galleries.26 The particularity of Architectural Studies and Projects, organized by Emilio Ambasz together with Barbara Jakobson for the Art Lending Service, a project of the Junior Council, was that it presented fifty brand-new architectural drawings which were acquired for the collection directly from the drafting table, more specifically utopian, dystopian, as well as sculptural projects (Eisenman was represented with a set of transformations of House VI, then under construction). A new aspect was that all drawings had immediately been transformed into commodities, as they were for sale.27 The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, an exhibition from which the IAUS explicitly distanced itself, became prominent since it united elements of high and low, bourgeois and mass culture, representing a major turning point in the policy of the museum that

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until then in the New York scene was affectionately referred to as ‘The Modern’.28 For this, the MoMA in cooperation with scholars from leading institutions presented original large-format drawings from the most influential art school in Paris, exhibiting the dominant ideas of nineteenth-century French academicism that once had influenced American architecture, and again stood in as reference projects for a postmodern neo-classical practice. Against this twofold background – both the developments in the exhibition circuit and the art market – the claim for an artistic and intellectual autonomy, on which Idea as Model was based, needs to be redefined, or at least differentiated. The IAUS promoted the architectural model as a work of art, thus encouraging the merger of the field of architecture and the art world, accepting the two-faced reality of this special production: the idea that the model inevitably acquired the double status as symbolic object and cultural commodity. This prevailing of the cultural-as-commercial value of the model is evident from the poster design for Idea as Model, executed by Michael Graves and his students at Princeton University. (Figure 11.2) The hand-made 3D design of pastel colours and different materials, branded by the IAUS as it was mounted on their printed template, was immediately turned into a collector’s item produced in a limited edition. Still, even though the architectural models on display at the Institute were meant to confirm the absolute autonomy of architects, the exhibition, driven by peer pressure, clearly missed its goal of establishing criteria for a new kind of model-making.29 Most contributions to Idea as Model were conceptually not convincing at all, and even Eisenman flunked, as he presented a colour-coded plexiglas model of House II, produced by some of his interns, that was done in retrospect. The IAUS, in order to promote a certain reading of Idea as Model and to have a say in the afterlife of the group show and a lasting legacy in architecture and art history, ultimately published an exhibition catalogue. Originally scheduled for publication in 1977, the catalogue – an architecture book in its own right rather than accompanying documentation – took almost five years until it was finally published in 1981, not by MIT Press but by commercial publisher Rizzoli International. (Figure 11.3)30 Next to Peter Eisenman’s introduction to the topic and an essay on the history of architectural models written by Christian Hubert, the catalogue reproduced photographs of twenty-two models stemming from the exhibition, and also of a set of new models that were commissioned from most of the architects who had participated. Still, within the period of five years between the exhibition and its publication, not only had the architecture world changed,31 a genuine market for architectural drawings and models had developed in New York, dominated by a few key figures, collectors, dealers, gallerists and producers, and exhibited in places such as Leo Castelli Gallery and Max Protetch Gallery.32 Without doubt, some of the Institute’s fellows not only anticipated this development but promoted it and profited from it. Eisenman, for instance, contributed a model of House X to the inaugural show at Max Protetch in 1978 and then the IAUS as

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FIGURE 11.2 Poster for ‘Idea as Model’ exhibition at the IAUS, designed by Michael Graves and students from Princeton University, winter 1976-77. Source: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatsammlung, ZHdK.

it further professionalized its exhibition programme with New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds and collaborated with the commercial architecture gallery on monographic exhibitions such as those on Aldo Rossi (1979), John Hejduk (1980), Massimo Scolari (1980) and later Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (1983). While a culture of architecture exhibitions developed in New York – in institutions such as

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FIGURE 11.3 Cover of IAUS exhibition catalogue Idea as Model. 22 Architects 1976/80, published in 1981 by Rizzoli International. Source: private library.

the Cooper Hewitt-Museum (1976), the recently opened Drawing Center (1977), and the Architecture Room at P.S.1 (1978) – the IAUS prospered as an event space.33 Thus, it would be presumptuous to see Idea as Model as a disinterested venture; there are distinct reasons to analyse and criticize it as instrumental in establishing the architectural model as both a work of art and a material object, the value of which is determined by commodity fetishism. This cultural shift manifested itself once more as Peter Eisenman, who in his publications presented himself as an artist-architect, far from being independent and unconnected even sold one out of three copies of the House II model to Heinrich Klotz at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt, Germany.34 The New York architecture

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scene, not least through the legitimizing powers of the IAUS, became the field of work for many cultural producers (alongside architects, critics, theorists and historians there were curators, publishers, etc.). Apart from their arguable failure or co-option, the alleged avant-garde of postmodern architecture was complicit in commercial exploitation by applying artistic and intellectual, curatorial and editorial practices that transformed all kinds of architectural objects into assets, whether part of real estate portfolios or art collections.

The profound transformation of architecture culture The IAUS, partly public forum, partly elitist salon, in the mid-1970s changed profoundly within a short period of time: it transformed in terms of its strategies, finances, structure, organization, programming and output, while accumulating and concentrating symbolic as well as economic capital. This came to light when the IAUS in 1977, celebrating its 10th anniversary, reached its peak of creativity and power. That year, the IAUS was granted a cultural institution grant from National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for ‘Open Plan’, a follow-up to ‘Architecture’ as a programme in continuing education, which was highlighted in The New York Times as one of the architectural events of that year. Instrumentalizing a reorientation towards the humanities, sociology and anthropology to attract larger funding, the Institute’s fellows modified, differentiated and diversified the product range of publications, adding the architectural tabloid Skyline, the IAUS Exhibition Catalogues and the Oppositions Books series to the portfolio. For a moment, the IAUS had commodified all its cultural products and productions, promoting lecture tours, travelling exhibitions, exhibition catalogues and slide shows as teaching and learning materials, extending its sphere of influence on a North American scale. Without doubt, despite a more professionalized cultural production at the Institute, both Oppositions and Idea as Model were proof that the IAUS was far from assuming the dimension of a mass culture. However, if we could agree not to consider restricted productions in the architecture field such as journals or exhibitions simply as works of art in their own right, detached from their contexts of production and diffusion, then the focus is completely on other issues with regard to the institutionalization of postmodernism. This discussion of the postmodern media in architecture – as part of a multi-level paradigm shift, conditioned and constrained by profound changes in society, politics and economy and seen against the backdrop of the development of the books and journals sector, the transformation of museums and galleries, and the activities of the art market, private collectors and art dealers – finds itself dealing with the effects of intercollective and intra-collective positions. These sociocultural positionings with

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journals and exhibitions are considered as discursive constructions of individual and collective biographies that have reproduced traditional concepts of avantgarde art and architecture as well as notions of author and text. Eventually, the IAUS before it collapsed had moved towards becoming a player in neoliberal globalization. By the early 1980s, the development of its product range displayed how the responsibility that came with the growing budget had made the professionalization and bureaucratization of administration, programming and product development inevitable. Then again, once the provision of government support was cut and alternative funding such as philanthropy became the main source of financing, the IAUS as a cultural elite built more and more bridges with the architectural establishment and developers who were involved as members of the architects’ circle to increase the level of cultural sponsoring – this was displayed in its Board of Trustees. Here, the courting of Philip Johnson including features in Skyline, Oppositions, the exhibitions programme and the catalogue series is just one, if not the most telling, example. This postmodernization of architecture culture also meant that the IAUS, promoting single authorship and individual works of art, supported the emergence of a celebrity culture in the field of architecture, applying a mixture of gossip and media hype, marketing and public relations, to make worldwide stars of architects and scholars.

Notes 1

The IAUS can be seen as a paradigmatic example of those ‘well-defined cultural spaces, entrusted with the task of pleasurably entertaining a highly selected public’ that Manfredo Tafuri referred to in his analysis of the New York architecture scene, published in 1976. See: Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Les cendres de Jefferson’, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 186 (August/September 1976), 53. In the French original, Tafuri refers to ‘production’ instead of ‘space’: ‘une production spécialement destinée à la culture qui a pour rôle de divertir agréablement un public sélectionné’, 53–58. The text was later published in an English translation as ‘The Ashes of Jefferson’, in Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 291–303.

2

In recent years, there have been first attempts to write a comprehensive history of the IAUS primarily by authors, who as the Institute’s fellows once in some way or other have been involved in its operations, see: Suzanne Frank, IAUS. An Insider’s Memoir (with 27 Other Insider’s Accounts) (New York: self published, 2010); see also the documentary film The Making of an Avant-garde (2012, director: Diana Agrest). Also, architectural historians and theorists, next to other fellows, have published on single episodes, products and productions of the IAUS. In my institutional critique of cultural production in the field of architecture with the IAUS as a case, which I researched in the course of my doctoral dissertation at ETH Zurich, I dealt with its operations throughout its life as a research and project office, architecture school, event and exhibition space, and publishing and editorial practice.

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3

See: The Museum of Modern Art, ed., Another Chance for Housing, Low-Rise Alternatives, Exhibition Catalogue (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973). See also: Suzanne Stephens, ‘It’s all in the Family’, Architectural Forum 139 (July– August 1973), 25 and 27; David Morton, ‘Low-rise, High-density. UDC/IAUS Publicly Assisted Housing’, Progressive Architecture 54 (December 1973), 56–63; and Suzanne Stephens, ‘Compromised Ideal: Marcus Garvey Park Village, Brooklyn, NY’, Progressive Architecture 160 (October 1979), 50–53 (topical issue: Low-rise Housing). For an account of the interests of the three partners involved and the complexities of getting the low-rise housing project built, see my oral history essay: Kim Förster, ‘The Housing Prototype of The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Negotiating Housing and the Social Responsibility of Architects within Cultural Production’, Candide 5 (March 2012), 57–92.

4

For a discussion of postmodern theory, see: Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984), 59–92. A philosophical discussion on postmodernism took place in New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984) (topical issue: Modernity and Postmodernity). See also: Peter Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000).

5

A good example here is the spectacular polemic, quite loudly proclaimed debate between the two new schools of formalist and historicist positions, the ‘Whites’ vs. the ‘Grays’, which was popularized through publications and the press, as well as in Oppositions; see for example: Nadia Watson, ‘The Whites vs. the Grays: Re-Examining the 1970s Avant-Garde’, Fabrications 5, 1 (July 2005), 55–69; see also: Reinhold Martin, ‘Language, c. 1973’, in Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 66. Yet the fact that the debate on the right kind of postmodernism also took place at the Institute is often overlooked. Martin compared the Gray/White debate with a box-fight, as it could have been broadcasted on TV, i.e. it was a media event, where the spectators have to take sides. See: Martin, ‘History. The Last War’, in Utopia’s Ghost, 29. However, this analogy was only true to some extent, as the debate, due to the character of its set-up, might be better compared to a wrestling event.

6

For a discussion of the medium as a model of perception and knowledge, see: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (Toronto: The New American Library, 1964). In this sense, the IAUS had epistemological consequences.

7

See: George Lapassade, Gruppen, Organisationen, Institutionen (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1972).

8

See: Pierre Bourdieu, ‘ The Field of Cultural Production’, Poetics 12, 4–5 (1983), 311–356 and ‘ The Market of Symbolic Goods’ [originally published as ‘Le marché desbiens symboliques’ in L’année sociologique 22 (1971), 49–126], Poetics 14, 1–2 (1983), 13–44. However, Bourdieu, theorizing upon the sociology of art, literature and culture, did not focus explicitly on the field of architecture here, although his arguments can be translated to new kinds of practice, in terms of its actors, institutions and politics.

9

See: Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–147.

10 Bourdieu’s elaborations on the field of cultural production, though, were echoed

heavily in the reflections on an autonomous respectively critical practice of those

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who have been former Institute’s fellows: first, when Peter Eisenman, in a lecture that he delivered as professor of design at the Cooper Union in 1986, defined the characteristics of a critical architecture as based in the fact that ‘architecture must be at distance from itself and yet within its boundaries’ by dislocating the existing institutions, thus also its own institutions, especially ‘the schools’ and ‘the museum’, but also ‘the professional societies, the professional journals and the private practitioners’. See: Peter Eisenman, ‘A Critical Practice. American Architecture in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century’, in John Hejduk et al., eds, Education of an Architect, Volume 2 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1988), 190–193. Then, two years later, Joan Ockman in her account of Oppositions pointed out Eisenman’s ‘energetic talents as impresario and publicist’. See: Joan Ockman, ‘Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Programme of Oppositions’, in Beatriz Colomina, ed., ArchitectuReproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 180–199. For an original discussion of the sociology of artistic and literary production, see: Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, reprinted in.The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 112–41, especially 121, as well as 112 and 123. 11 Manfredo Tafuri, during the 1970s, with several essays pushed a critical study of the

neo-avant-garde in architecture on both sides of the Atlantic. See also: Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); and Hal Foster, ‘What is New About the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, October 70 (Autumn 1994), 5–22. 12 The first historiographic account of Oppositions already discussed the journal’s

concept and its publication history, as well as the different positions and roles of its editors and their relations; see: Joan Ockman, ‘Resurrecting the Avant-Garde’. 13 See: Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976). Although dated earlier, the issue was released on

26 October 1976. 14 See: Poster announcing the content of numbers 5–8 of Oppositions, 1975. Source:

CCA Montréal, IAUS Fonds, ARCH250449. 15 Oppositions 5 included the following essays: Rafael Moneo, ‘Aldo Rossi: The Idea

of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery’, Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), 2–21; Manfredo Tafuri, ‘American Graffiti: Five × Five = Twenty Five’, Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), 35–72. 16 See: Tafuri, ‘Les cendres de Jefferson’; See also: Reinhold Martin, ‘History. The Last

War’, in Utopia’s Ghost, 30. 17 See: IAUS, eds, Aldo Rossi in America, 1976–1979. Catalogue 2 (New York: MIT Press,

1979). 18 The five texts by Manfredo Tafuri published in Oppositions constituted a large part of

his theory of the neo-avant-garde; see: ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir. The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’, Oppositions 3 (May 1974), 37–62; ‘American Graffiti: Five × Five = Twenty Five’, Oppositions 5 (Summer 1976), 35–72; ‘The Historical Project’, Oppositions 17 (Summer 1979), 55–75. 19 See: Bourdieu, ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’. 20 In 1976 and 1977, all four editors published individual editorials in Oppositions;

see: Kenneth Frampton, ‘On Reading Heidegger’, Oppositions 4 (October 1974), unpaginated; Mario Gandelsonas, ‘Neo-Functionalism’, Oppositions 5 (Summer

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1976), unpaginated; Peter Eisenman, ‘Post-Functionalism’, Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976), unpaginated; Anthony Vidler, ‘ The Third Typology’, Oppositions 7 (Winter 1976), 1–4. 21 Based on Eisenman’s networks, the IAUS after 1976 extended the relations to

professors at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) via Oppositions, at a time when the history department there was redesigned under the direction of Manfredo Tafuri into a place of critical historiography. For authors from Europe, a publication of their essays in English through the Institute and MIT Press seemed to have been quite attractive. Alongside Tafuri, Oppositions also published Francesco Dal Co, and later also Massimo Cacciari and George Teyssot. Two other professors from the so-called Venice School, Massimo Scolari and Giorgio Ciucci, spent some time as visiting fellows at the Institute, having been invited to teach, publish, lecture and exhibit there. However, the IAUS, contrary to plans, did not manage to organize joint research, teaching and publication projects with the IUAV. 22 See: IAUS, eds, Idea as Model. 22 Architects 1976/80, Catalogue 3 (New York: Rizzoli

International, 1981). 23 See: Andrew MacNair, letter to Robert Stern, 28 July 1976. Source: Yale University:

Robert A.M. Stern Archive. 24 Another story is that Soho-based artist Gordon Matta-Clark had been invited, too – a

trained architect, who had come to international fame for his splittings, happenings and performances. Idea as Model first gained notoriety in the art rather than the architecture world, because of Matta-Clark’s contribution to the exhibition titled ‘Window Blowout’. Matta-Clark’s exhibit, which actually turned out to be more of a performance piece than an architectural model, was claimed to have stressed the polarization of formalist architecture vs. socially and politically engaged art practice. However, Idea as Model has not yet been historicized from an institutional point of view. 25 See: MoMA: Press Release no. 14: ‘Architectural Studies and Projects’, 13 March 1975;

online: www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/5233/releases/MOMA_1975_0018_14. pdf?2010 [accessed 7 January 2017]. For a contemporary criticism see two reviews of the unusual show which were published in The New York Times: Paul Goldberger, ‘Architectural Drawings at the Modern’, The New York Times, 14 March 1975, 24; and: Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘Poetic Visions of Design for the Future’, The New York Times, 27 April 1975, 142. While Goldberger usually formulated popular positions, Huxtable was rather critical of the recent developments. 26 See: MoMA: Press Release no. 59: ‘The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts’,

8 August 1975; online: www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_ archives/5289/releases/MOMA_1975_0074_59.pdf?2010 [accessed 7 January 2017]; and: The Museum of Modern Art, eds, The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (New York: MoMA, 1975). 27 See: Barbara Jakobson (interview with Sharon Zane), Museum of Modern Art:

Oral History Program, 29 October 1997, 22. See also: Sarah DeYong et al., eds, The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 28 For a discussion of how the ‘Beaux-Arts’-exhibition fits into the curatorial work

of Arthur Drexler at the MoMA, and how he was seen by the Institute’s fellows,

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see: Felicity Scott, ‘When Systems Fail: Arthur Drexler and the Postmodern Turn’, Perspecta 35 (2004), 134–153, republished in Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 59–87. 29 Idea as Model encompassed a total of twenty-four models of varying quality. They had

been produced by Institute’s fellows (alongside Peter Eisenman also Diana Agrest, Mario Gandelsonas, William Ellis), visiting fellows (Rafael Moneo, Stuart Wrede), architects from New York (Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, Charles Moore, Jaquelin Robertson, Robert Stern) and Europe (O.M. Ungers, Massimo Scolari, Leon Krier). 30 See: IAUS, eds, Idea as Model. 31 See: Richard Pommer, ‘The Idea of “Idea as Model”’ and ‘Post-script to a Post-

mortem’, in IAUS, eds, Idea as Model (New York: Rizzoli International, 1981), 3–9 and 10–15. 32 In 1977, Leo Castelli Gallery showed the exhibition Architecture I followed by

Architecture II: Houses for Sale (1980), and in 1978, Max Protetch Gallery moved from Washington, DC, to New York. Apparently, Eisenman was commissioned to design the gallery interior for the first location of Max Protetch at 37 West 57th Street, a plan which was not realized. For this information I am indebted to Martin Hartung, who is completing a doctorate at the ETH Zurich on the topic of the architectural model and other objects in relation to the art market. 33 The IAUS in its monthly tabloid newspaper Skyline, published from 1978 to 1980 and

again from 1981 to 1983 in a revised version, announced and reviewed a selection of architecture exhibitions in New York. 34 Eisenman sold a model of House II, similar to that on display in Idea as Model, to

Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt/Main for 3000 DM for the permanent collection; see: Franziska Stein, ‘Peter Eisenman: HOUSE II (Falk House)’, in Peter Cachola Schmal and Oliver Elser, eds, Das Architekturmodell. Werkzeug, Fetisch, kleine Utopie (Zürich: Scheidegger und Spiess, 2012), 250–254. In fact, Eisenman had been visited by Heinrich Klotz, DAM’s founding director, in New York, yet he did not agree to provide information on this sale. On Klotz, see: ARCH+ 216 (May 2014) (topical issue: The Klotz Tapes. The Making of Postmodernism).

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12 IMAGE, MEDIUM, ARTEFACT: HEINRICH KLOTZ AND THE POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM DANIELA FABRICIUS

New theories on media were central to postmodern thought. According to its philosophers, postmodern societies were moving towards a dematerialized culture characterized by simulacra, information and codes, and away from a culture of authenticity, materiality and authorship. This postmodern condition was famously staged in the seminal 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou, where the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard presented a collection of material and immaterial cultural artefacts that illustrated the changes that had taken place in post-war technological societies. The multimedia exhibition, designed to suggest diverse ways of perceiving information, argued for a shift from material to immaterial production and a radical shift in relationships between subjects and objects. Postmodern architecture coincided with these technological and cultural transformations around media. And yet it is not clear what consequences this culture of dematerialization had for postmodern architecture and how it was represented. Was the documentation, dissemination and display of postmodern architecture influenced by these new media forms? Postmodern architecture reflected conflicting cultural attitudes towards media: on the one hand it embraced the images, signs and forms of representation found in popular culture; A special thanks to Anika Kindervater, Julia Brandes, Oliver Elser and the editors of ARCH+ for their generosity in making research materials for this essay available.

but it was at the same time marked by a tendency towards nostalgia and a new longing for authenticity. The latter could even be understood as a response to the dematerialization of culture through new media technologies. Media was thus embraced as a method of disseminating signs on the one hand, but was also, as I will argue here, used as a tool for the production of historical aura. This conflicted approach was evident in the framing and exhibiting of postmodern architecture by the German architecture historian and curator Heinrich Klotz (Figure 12.1).1 Klotz was the founding director of two significant West German institutions: the German Architecture Museum (DAM) in Frankfurt (from 1979 to 1989), and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (from 1989 until just before his death in 1999). The founding of the ZKM in the late 1980s coincided with the beginning of the digital turn in architecture. As the medium of architecture was becoming ‘paperless’, its traditional representational tools – hand drawings and physical models – would slowly be replaced. Klotz was wary of the potential for digital media to change the status of the human experience of images: ‘The image that is pixelated and dismantled into thousands of individual elements cools down perception, creates distance. But the cooling of the emotions through the transformation into binary systems can be overcome through art … A digital image can also be “human.”’2 But in the founding documents of the ZKM there was also an optimism around new media – a ‘new Bauhaus’ was envisioned where the boundaries between

FIGURE 12.1 Heinrich Klotz in the Kunsthal Rotterdam, 1988. (Freek van Arkel).

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art, technology and electronic media would be erased.3 This can be seen in Rem Koolhaas’s unbuilt project for the ZKM, commissioned by Klotz, which proposed a ‘deep’ container for the new hybrid programmes to flow into one another. In Koolhaas’s representation the dematerialized building facade would become a media screen for Hollywood Westerns and Andy Warhol. By contrast, when in 1984 Klotz opened the DAM with the exhibition Revision of the Modern: Postmodern Architecture 1960–1980, it was distinguished not by the use of new media, but an insistence on exhibiting original drawings and models (Figure 12.2). What Klotz refers to several times as the ‘human’ and elsewhere as ‘aura’ would determine his curatorial approach and even, as I will argue, his use of media. This emphasis on displaying original artefacts cannot simply be explained by the new importance of models and ‘paper architecture’ as part of the project of

FIGURE 12.2 Installation view showing models by Oswald Mathias Ungers and archive files. ‘Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960–1980’. 2 June–10 October 1984. Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt. Photo: Waltraud Krase.

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architectural autonomy, but should be read as a very deliberate statement on the artefact in relation to architecture, media and the museum. Klotz’s founding of the DAM and the establishment of its collection of architectural artefacts – mostly drawings and models but also tools and instruments, furniture and ephemera – can be viewed as a reassertion of architectural artefacts as cultural commodities and expressions of institutional power. This framing of the architectural artefact emerged in tandem with the loss of materiality and authenticity that new media forms implied. The museum became an archive and container of these different understandings of the medium of architecture.

Institutionalizing postmodern architecture Revision of the Modern was the first major museum exhibition of postmodern architecture in Germany, or anywhere else for that matter. Inaugurating the museum in Frankfurt am Main designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers, the exhibition seemed conceived to retroactively establish historical and institutional legitimacy for a movement that was still little understood in Germany. Klotz had been following the development of postmodernism since 1969, when he was a visiting professor at Yale. In what he calls a ‘conversion’, Klotz identified a break in the modern tradition, prompted in part by the deaths of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Richard Neutra.4 Klotz had planned to interview these architects for a book, and was shattered when all three died within a short period of time. This was in part what inspired Klotz to pursue a ‘living history’ through the use of media technologies like audio recording. Klotz viewed these recorded conversations as the ‘medial corrective’ to a history based only on buildings:5 We believe that there is no better way of writing history than speaking with the living. We were overcome with awareness of this when we arrived in the office of Mies van der Rohe with a recording device, and the only thing we could see of his presence was the empty chrome wheelchair in the corner of his room.6 While he had set out to document the émigrés of the European modern movement, Klotz ended up writing the histories of American postmodernism. At Yale, Klotz met Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi, and co-published Conversations with Architects, a book of interviews with these and other prominent American architects, whom he saw as introducing an ‘indigenous’ American style that was independent of the influence of European modernism.7 Klotz claimed that his afterword in the German translation of the book, published in 1974, was the ‘first German-language description of

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postmodernism, though it wasn’t called such at the time’.8 When he returned to Germany, Klotz’s attacks against the ‘pedantic doctrine of functionalism’ and its ‘puritan’ ‘hostility towards images’ resulted in what he called an ‘hysterical uproar’ among architects.9 Klotz’s defence of form and aesthetics was viewed as a threat by both orthodox modernists and the students of ’68, particularly those influenced by sociology and systems theory. This was especially felt during a 1974 event that Klotz organized at the International Design Center in Berlin on the topic of the ‘Pathos of Functionalism’, to which he invited Moore, Aldo Rossi, and Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.10 Klotz’s discourse on postmodernism was quite specific to the West German context. Functionalism had become the preferred language of post-war reconstruction and the image of the new Bonn capital. Klotz’s discourse was thus not centred around the term ‘postmodern’, but instead the defence of postfunctionalist architecture and the retrieval of the historic avant-garde from its degradation into what he called Bauwirtschaftsfunktionalismus (construction industry functionalism).11 Klotz writes: ‘my position was similar to Charles Jencks’, only I didn’t have the pleasure of stirring up the whole architectural world with a daring concept like Post-Modernism’.12 While Jencks had dramatically announced the ‘death’ of modern architecture with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in 1972, Klotz never argued for such a break.13 Klotz argued that the term ‘postmodern’ was misleading, preferring to describe his exhibition as a ‘revision’ of the modern project.14 He was suspicious of Jencks’s ‘promiscuous’ embrace of pluralism, and the wholesale inclusion of nostalgia, kitsch, historicism and eclecticism.15 He defended a ‘second modernism’ that would confront the purity of modernism and its architecture of ‘smooth boxes’ and ‘oceans of monotony’.16 The revision of modernism, he argued, would be characterized by ‘fiction’ over ‘function’: ‘an architecture that once again allows for the attached forms of the pictorial and representational, of decoration and ornament, of symbols and signs’.17 This was an architecture of communication and context, a humanization of the modern movement. But wasn’t this all a bit late? Klotz admitted that by the time the DAM exhibition opened in 1984, postmodernism was already a ‘well-worn coin’.18 Indeed, postmodernism was already being used in the design of corporate office towers (including those in Frankfurt) and New Urbanist planning, and there were first signs of a backlash against the movement. Klotz’s approach to postmodernism was cautious – he defined the uncontroversial term ‘revision’ as ‘the third way between conservatism and revolution’.19 This decidedly post-’68 attitude served him well in the conservative political climate of West Germany in the early 1980s, where the idea of revolution had become unmentionable. Even if postmodernism did not always appeal to the West German public, Klotz was able to successfully sell it to the political and financial elite of Frankfurt to launch the DAM as part of the Museumsufer, a cluster of fifteen museums near the Main river.20

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Photography and the ‘human code’ While Klotz’s conceptualization of postmodernism was often limited, his use of media to document and exhibit postmodern architecture was expansive.21 In his role as a chronicler of history Klotz used a variety of media devices, including a camera, a Dictaphone and a tape recorder, and became a pioneer in the use of the interview format as a medium for writing architecture history. But perhaps the most significant contribution was Klotz’s extensive collection of photographic slides of both modern and postmodern architecture.22 Klotz began photographing buildings in the 1960s during a trip to Italy where he spent two years building a substantial archive of Tuscan Gothic architecture.23 This initiated the construction of a slide archive based on visits to buildings, which he used for teaching, research and publications. Klotz often visited buildings under construction, and with their architects, creating a portrait of both the building and its designer. Later, Klotz kept an audio diary describing some of these visits, so that in many cases there were two simultaneous sources of media documentation: the voice recording his impressions, and the camera. Klotz’s theory of architectural photography was outlined in the 1971 essay ‘Über das Abbilden von Bauwerken’ (On the depiction of buildings).24 He criticized the ‘objective coldness’ with which buildings are photographed without the context of human scale. As a result, ‘buildings stand as one never saw them: as if they were behind glass. In the photo, they become untouchable museum pieces … They have become that which the architecture historians made them: objects and memorials, isolated works of art’.25 Here, Klotz associates the medium of photography with the exhibited object, revealing a common way of thinking about the two. For Klotz the presence of a human figure or even a car or piece of furniture provides the ‘human code’ to avoid the effect of distance. He is suspicious of claims of objectivity of the interpreter of the object, as ‘his words are now the words of the thing itself – his still speaking subjectivity apparently becomes the language of the object –, as if the thing, the work of art, had its own tongue’.26 Klotz is arguing for a sense of context and communication, for a building to stand in relationship to human subjectivity and experience. Klotz’s mode of depicting the built environment was no doubt also influenced by the vision of the architects whose work he photographed. Venturi and Scott Brown depicted the architecture of Las Vegas in a decidedly unmonumental way, emphasizing the everyday and alternative forms of signification in the city. This was achieved in part through ‘deadpan’ photographic techniques borrowed from artists like Ed Ruscha.27 More specifically, the medium of slide photography as a way to document everyday architecture was of interest to several artists in the 1960s, including Dan Graham, who first exhibited his 1965 piece Homes for America, a documentation of suburban homes in the United States, in the form of a slide show. Similarly, Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969–1972), which depicted a decaying Mexican hotel, was first a slide show used for an architectural

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‘lecture’. The photographic slide was a compact and inexpensive format used for archives and lectures, suggesting objectivity and knowledge, but was at the same time highly ephemeral in how it was viewed and experienced – as a projection. The largest portion of the slide photo archive that Klotz would build over the next decades was devoted to postmodern architecture. In these photographs Klotz explored the sort of contextual photography that he argued for in his writing. Klotz had a remarkable feel for the spatial context of architecture, especially in the American city. This is shown to great effect in his photographs of buildings where the highway and parking lot figured prominently, sometimes taking up the greater part of the frame. Klotz noted in his diary ‘how difficult it was to photograph these decorated sheds’, and mentions the importance of the urban context in representing them.28 In a photograph of Venturi and Scott Brown’s 1976 BASCO showroom in Northeast Philadelphia, the large, iconic red letters (‘B’ ‘A’ ‘S’) appear as if glued to the front of a blue shed, where they compete with a foreground of yellow parking lot markings and cars, and an uninspiring lamp post (Figure 12.3). Cesar Pelli’s 1975 Pacific Design Center in Hollywood forms a blasé backdrop for a black Volkswagen Beetle, its form strangely analogous to the cartoonish shape of the building, waiting at an intersection. Some photographs were taken from car windows, an acknowledgement of the experience of urban space from the perspective of the automobile documented by Venturi and Scott Brown. This is seen in the photograph of Les Espaces d’Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill, a monumental and imposing structure which here appears diminutive next to a suburban highway and beyond the view of a windshield, surrounded by cranes, traffic signs and vulgar real-estate advertisements. A more deliberate and composed sense of context can be seen in a photograph of Venturi’s 1961 Guild House, where the sign on the facade is shown next to the bright signage painted on two commercial trucks parked in front of the building. The word ‘Modern’ appears on the tomato red siding of one. Here it is clear that Klotz was aware of the aesthetic language of pop. Other photographs of buildings show Klotz’s understanding of the sensibility of their architects. In an enigmatic photograph of Rossi’s Gallaratese Housing in Milan two women (one of whom was Klotz’s wife) stand on a terracotta-coloured bridge spanning two buildings, facing away from the camera towards an empty white facade. In another, almost identical small white cars are lined up in front of the repeating columns of the facade (Figure 12.3). The human scale is inserted quite literally in a ‘selfie’ taken in a bathroom at Charles Moore’s 1963 Sea Ranch resort, where Klotz, clad only in a small swimsuit, appears reflected in a mirror beneath an enormous red heart painted on the wall. Other photographs show decidedly anti-monumental views – like the electric meter on the side of the Vanna Venturi House. Or a view of what Klotz calls the ‘populist destruction’ of Kahn’s Salk Institute: when Klotz visited it in 1980 the famous plaza was filled with tables covered with red and white chequered tablecloths and rubber cacti for an event organized by a women’s group (Figure 12.3).29 Klotz’s

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FIGURE 12.3 Clockwise from top left: Louis Kahn, Salk Institute, San Diego, 1965; Robert Venturi, Guild House, 1961; Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, BASCO Showroom, Northeast Philadelphia, 1976; Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan, 1973. All photos by Heinrich Klotz.

admission of populist elements was selective; he complained not only about the Salk Institute, but also the kitschy plastic flowers on the balcony of Venturi’s Guild House.30 Klotz’s photographs also offer a glimpse of the politics of urban blight in the American city. Charles Moore’s exuberant Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans is almost unrecognizable amid the background of derelict buildings, construction sites and signs advertising ‘New Jobs for Your Community’. Klotz’s inclusion of human figures, cars and urban signage has another effect: it ties the architecture to a very specific time and place. This suggests that buildings are not monuments that stand outside of history, but instead bear the traces of a particular moment and of the humans that occupy them. The relatively slow gestation period of architecture, and its will to permanence, is contrasted against the rapid cycles of fashion and commodity design. These ephemeral qualities captured in the photographs would influence Klotz’s role as a collector and curator of postmodern architecture.

Unmediated objects While Klotz had conceived of a museum devoted to architecture as early as 1972, it was not until 1979 that he began the task of acquiring works for the collection of the DAM. The museum’s first exhibition was curated entirely out of this collection. 238

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If Klotz’s photographs were a mediated search for contingency or an authentic human trace, this was an attempt to find unmediated, material objects. Klotz observed that ‘nobody took the work materials of architects seriously’.31 He cites his 1969 visit to the office of Mies van der Rohe, where he saw a working model ‘full of traces of use’, lamenting that the model, along with innumerable sketches, ended up in the garbage. He writes: ‘When (Mies) passed away, a whole era went with him, all the signs and symbols of his life. Of course, most of his buildings were still standing, but those things he directly worked with were being thrown out, and that depressed me.’32 In a 1985 interview with Klotz, Jencks compared his insistence on physical evidence to that of an archaeologist or anthropologist, and accused him of being ‘highly nostalgic’ in his efforts to gather past memories and ‘give value to what is ephemeral’.33 For Jencks, who thought it sufficient to describe a building based on photographs, Klotz’s approach was typically German, and Romantic, in its attempt to ‘keep the past alive in the present’.34 According to Jencks, Klotz’s reliance on a privileged corpus of material evidence also influenced his view of history.35 The historical and material qualities of these artefacts also gave them monetary value. Klotz was given a budget of two million DM to build what was called the ‘largest collection of contemporary architecture in the world’.36 In travels to Europe, London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Japan, Klotz visited architects and their buildings, and bought drawings and models. In his diaries, Klotz describes the delicate and still uncommon practice of determining the value of these objects. For example, he expresses his frustration with Moore, who apparently drew on napkins and threw them away, and retrieves a model of the Piazza d’Italia from a dumpster outside his studio. When he visits Venturi, he notes with surprise that he saved his drawings, commenting: ‘this is a clear sign that Venturi is operating with the awareness of having made something groundbreaking and worth documenting in every detail’.37 Klotz has a very different experience with Peter Eisenman: ‘I saw his projects, drawings, sketches, plans, that were wildly heaped onto a table, which he rummaged through as if none of it had any value.’38 The drawings in Klotz’s hands were indeed just becoming commodities – literally still priceless, their historic and market value was still being determined. By late 1981, Klotz notes with increasing anxiety that architectural drawings had suddenly found a market, especially in New York, where they were shown in galleries like Max Protetch.39 Klotz’s increasingly fetishistic relationship to the architectural artefact becomes manifest in a visit to Rossi’s studio in Milan. His sense of enchantment begins when Rossi turns off the lights and presents the illuminated ‘Teatrino Scientifico’ diorama, which Klotz describes as ‘a colorful world of wonder, a combination of doll house and ideal city’.40 Klotz then falls under a sort of spell as he looks at Rossi’s drawings: They are unbelievably beautiful drawings, large plans on thick tracing paper. I have a difficult time deciding for one or the other … Some of the drawings have HEINRICH KLOTZ AND THE POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM

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an auratic radiance, a power of attraction, that almost leads one to kleptomania … I feel just irresistibly attracted. Then Aldo brings out three sketchbooks, one of them with the quote by Walter Benjamin. They are colorful drawings … There is almost nothing more beautiful.41 It is no coincidence that Klotz evokes the concept of aura in the same breath that he mentions Rossi’s sketchbook. The Benjamin quote Klotz refers to may have been the one Rossi cites in his 1976 essay ‘An Analogical Architecture’: ‘I am unquestionably deformed by relationships with everything that surrounds me.’42 Rossi used this as a way to describe analogical relationships between architectural parts. Taken from ‘Die Mummerehlen’, a section of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, it reads in its entirety: ‘I was distorted by similarity to all that surrounded me. Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear.’43 This passage referred to Benjamin’s description of having his picture taken in a photographer’s studio as a boy. He describes this boy resembling the ‘dwelling places, furniture, and clothes’ that surrounded him, a phenomenon he writes of elsewhere as aura ‘seeping’ out of a person into surrounding materials, or the aura of the habitual.44 The mollusc shell acts as a space that absorbs the auratic trace of a subject, but it is also an earpiece, a media device that plays back a memory. This particular type of aura is prevalent in Rossi’s architecture, but it can also be used to explain Klotz’s insistence on photographing buildings and their architects with traces of the habitual. This is seen in Klotz’s photographs of Rossi’s home. One shows a workspace where a mantle serves as a kind of altar, surrounded by Rossi’s paintings and models (Figure 12.4). Tools lie on the desk, and a jacket is draped over the back of the chair, suggesting the absent presence of the architect. Klotz photographs another ‘altar’ in Rossi’s kitchen, which overflows with traditional and handcrafted kitchen tools and children’s toys, nostalgically evoking a preindustrial past. To the right a clock and calendar mark the exact moment when the photograph was taken: at 1:21 on 17 February 1981. It came as little surprise that Klotz was enthralled by nineteenth-century medium of the diorama, which promised total absorption into an image environment. During a trip to New York, Klotz visited the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and once again seemed overcome by the enchantment he felt in Rossi’s studio: What I saw here overshadowed everything that was similar. The landscape dioramas are like pictures of the highest grade of illusion. You see them framed in front of you, see them lit by the most beautiful light, and you want to step inside, loosen the moss from the tree branches, and mingle among the animals. Yet it is a picture, a highly sophisticated trick, a brilliant illusion of the highest aesthetic.45 240

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FIGURE 12.4 Home of Aldo Rossi, 1981. Photo by Heinrich Klotz.

Klotz’s description is reminiscent of another story recounted by Benjamin in Berlin Childhood, the story of a Chinese painter who suddenly disappears from his studio, only to reappear inside his own painted landscape. Benjamin evoked the Chinese painter again in his famous ‘Work of Art’ essay, when he writes of the connoisseur who is absorbed by the artwork as he contemplates it, in contrast to the masses that, in a state of distraction, ‘absorb the work of art into themselves’.46 Klotz again and again evokes the total immersion experienced by the connoisseur contemplating the original object, an experience that he wishes to recreate in his museum.47 Klotz seems to want to achieve a similar state of unmediated absorption with original drawings and models. These would be used to construct the history of postmodern architecture: While the large Biennale exhibition in Venice illustrated the current state around 1980, we are trying to offer a broad flashback until the beginning of postmodernism. We are doing this by almost exclusively showing original drawings and plans, as well as an extensive collection of original models. Architectural exhibitions are usually photo exhibitions. The great seduction of the hand drawings is thus lost; and the aesthetic effect of today’s architectural plans can then only be divined as if through a filter presented before you.48 The mediating quality of photography is described here as a barrier separating the viewer from the seductive powers of the drawing. Klotz’s project is to render HEINRICH KLOTZ AND THE POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM

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postmodernism historical. The viewer is to experience this as a ‘flashback’ (Klotz uses the cinematic term Rückblende), which would apparently be triggered by the presence of the original objects.

A postmodern architecture museum When Revision der Moderne opened in June 1984, the exhibition was advertised with a poster showing a column bathed in a pink neon glow, a detail from Moore’s Piazza d’Italia as photographed by Klotz. While several of Klotz’s photographs were used in the exhibition, it was clear that this was ‘background material’, and the focus would be on drawings and models. Because Klotz preferred to show the objects without didactic text, a ‘newspaper’ was offered to lead the viewer through the show. The exhibition was organized both regionally and thematically, beginning with American postmodernism on the ground floor, moving up through European postmodernists, then European rationalists, and finally, to the top floor, which was devoted entirely to Ungers. Klotz experimented with several forms of media in the exhibition, including the newspaper and the slide show. The basement level housed a slide show on six projectors, which one unhappy reviewer described as a ‘cesspool of kitsch’.49 Cheerful colour slides of postmodern architecture were paired against triste, grey images of modern architecture, accompanied by the sound of a pan flute. The names of postmodern architects were presented in a heroic manner, ‘shooting out of the dark as in an epic Hollywood film’.50 It was clear, however, that this slide show served only as an introduction to the rest of the exhibition, which depended entirely on the artefacts. In the orderly white spaces of the museum, drawings were shown in simple white frames behind glass, and models were housed in vitrines. This emphasized the power and autonomy of the architectural object, and its role as a newly discovered fetish. The effect could not have been more different from the populist display of flimsy facades at the Strada Novissima at the Venice Biennale. As one critic noted: In spite of many prophecies of doom this exhibition proves that even pure architecture documents, which the drawings, plans, and models are, suffice to convey a plausible image of architecture. This is why didactic guiding texts, which could have relativized the effect of the drawings and models, were entirely avoided.51 Thus while ‘media’ was relegated to the basement, original artefacts were reserved for the top of the museum. On the floor dedicated to Ungers, a row of models was placed on top of an enormous stack of flat file cabinets. These

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contained the entirety of the museum’s collection of drawings – presumably inaccessible to the visitor. This was an extraordinary statement on the museum’s institutional power. The drawings inside need not even be shown – it was enough to suggest a material archive. The archive itself was put on display. In a further act of institutional self-referentiality, Ungers’ drawings of the museum were hung in the small ‘house’ that forms the core of the building. Achille Mbembe has described the archive as resurrecting that which is dead and ‘returning it to life’ after it is no longer part of the immediate present.52 This return can only take place after a certain period of ‘decontamination’, or, in the case of national archives, when documents no longer have a political effect. Did this archival treatment of postmodernism signal that the movement had come to its end? Even if documents no longer have a political effect, the building within which the archive is housed still exerts a form of power: The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension, which encompasses the physical space of the site of the building … and so we arrive at the inescapable materiality of the archive as well as at its resulting role … as an instituting imaginary.53 The physical authority of the archive is thus both materially and ideologically tied to the building that houses it – in this case, the museum. The architecture of the DAM created the ideal setting for this production of aura. The hollowed-out nineteenth-century villa was turned into a series of nested spaces referring to different architectural periods. This enclosure of one space within another calls to mind Benjamin’s description of the mollusc in its shell: a claustrophobic and repetitive process of interiorization that completely absorbs the subject into its environment. Was this repetition of spaces a product of the postmodern culture of reproduction? Or was it a symbolic regression into history? The same could be asked of Klotz’s exhibition, and the archive from which it was assembled. Klotz’s multimedia approach to writing history was decidedly postmodern, but these techniques of reproduction were used to preserve, not erase, history’s auratic traces. In Klotz’s exhibition, the medium of postmodern architecture was neither immaterial nor virtual. Nevertheless, the desire to return to the authorship of the original and material object can be read as a response to a postmodern cultural condition.

Notes 1

Klotz was born in 1935 in Worms. After studying art history, archaeology and philosophy he became a professor at the University of Marburg. He was also the founder of the HfG (Art School) of Karlsruhe.

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2

Nina Schmidt, ‘“Kunst und Leben verstehen sich nicht”: Gespräch mit Heinrich Klotz’, Baumeister 89, 10 (October 1992), 40–42, 40: my translation.

3

‘Das Konzept ’88’, http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$6845 [accessed 12 June 2015]; Heinrich Klotz, ‘The goal of the ZKM is to unite all art forms. That is an aesthetic utopia’: Schmidt, ‘“Kunst und Leben verstehen sich nicht”’, 42: my translation.

4

Heinrich Klotz, Weitergeben. Erinnerungen (Köln: Dumont, 1999), 49.

5

John Wesley Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Architektur im Widerspruch: Bauen in den USA von Mies van der Rohe bis Andy Warhol (Zürich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1974), 7.

6

Cook and Klotz, Architektur im Widerspruch, 7: my translation.

7

John Wesley Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects (New York: Praeger, 1973), 9.

8

Heinrich Klotz, ‘The Founding of the German Architecture Museum’, AD 55, 3–4 (1985), 5–7. 5.

9

For accounts of this period see Heinrich Klotz, Weitergegeben; Heinrich Klotz, ‘Das Pathos des Funktionalismus’, in Werk/Architese 3 (March 1977), 3–4; 22; Cook and Klotz, Architektur im Widerspruch.

10 ‘Das Pathos des Funktionalismus – Architektur und Design 1920 bis 1930. Reaktion

der Gegenwart’. IDZ Berlin, 9–13 September 1974. 11 See, for example, Heinrich Klotz, Das Pathos des Funktionalismus. Berliner Architektur

1920–1930 (Berlin: IDZ, 1974). 12 Klotz, ‘The Founding of the German Architecture Museum’, 6. 13 Klotz, always in rivalry with Jencks, would later claim that Jencks first found the

images of the Pruitt-Igoe towers in one of his books. Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes: Das Making-of der Postmoderne/The Making of Postmodernism – ARCH+ 216 (20 May 2014), 241. The photo appeared on page 25 of Heinrich Klotz et al., Keine Zukunft für unsere Vergangenheit? Denkmalschutz und Stadtzerstörung (Giessen: Schmitz, 1975). 14 Heinrich Klotz, ‘“Post-moderne”?’, in Heinrich Klotz, ed., Architektur: Texte zur

Geschichte, Theorie, und Kritik des Bauens (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1996), 208–211. Even if Klotz and Habermas were ideologically opposed when it came to postmodern architecture, this notion of continuity evokes Habermas’s thesis of the ‘unfinished project’ of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 15 Klotz, ‘“Post-moderne”?’ 208. 16 See Klotz, ‘Post-moderne?’ and Heinrich Klotz, ‘Die Revision der Moderne’, in

Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960–1980 (München: Prestel, 1984), 7: my translation. 17 Klotz, ‘Die Revision der Moderne’, 9. 18 Klotz, ‘Die Revision der Moderne’, 11. 19 Klotz, ‘Die Revision der Moderne’, 9. 20 Klotz worked closely with the Christian Democrat Walter Wallmann who became

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mayor of Frankfurt in 1977, and the more liberal cultural affairs councillor Hilmar Hoffmann. In a 1979 scene from his audio diary Klotz describes meeting with a bank executive in a downtown tower, discussing the prospect of reconstructing Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion in the Taunusanlage Park below the corporate skyscrapers. Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 57. 21 Klotz existed, as Anke te Heesen puts it, ‘in a state of contemporeneity conditioned by

media’. Anke te Heesen, ‘I Felt Like Vasari’, in Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 8–13, 12: my translations. 22 The archive of these slides has been organized and digitized by Julia Brandes as part

of her thesis, and is located at the HfG Karlsruhe. I am grateful for her assistance in accessing these materials. Julia Brandes, ‘Postmoderne Projektion: Das Heinrich Klotz – Bildarchiv der HfG Karlsruhe’ (Master’s Thesis and Exhibition, HfG Kalrsruhe, 2010). 23 Brandes, ‘Postmoderne Projektion: Das Heinrich Klotz-Bildarchiv der HfG

Karlsruhe’, 7. 24 Heinrich Klotz, ‘Über das Abbilden von Bauwerken’, Architectura 1 (1971), 1–14: my

translations. 25 Klotz, ‘Über das Abbilden von Bauwerken’, 1. 26 Klotz, ‘Über das Abbilden von Bauwerken’, 7. 27 See Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography,

and Film (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013). 28 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 73. 29 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 111. 30 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 73. 31 Klotz, ‘The Founding of the German Architecture Museum’, 5. 32 Heinrich Klotz, Charles Jencks, ‘In the steps of Vasari: Charles Jencks interviews

Heinrich Klotz’, AD 55, 3–4 (1985), 9–16, 9. 33 Klotz and Jencks, ‘In the steps of Vasari’, 14. 34 Klotz and Jencks, ‘In the steps of Vasari’, 14. 35 Klotz and Jencks, ‘In the steps of Vasari’, 14. 36 ‘Schätze für das “Haus im Haus” per Magistratsbeschluss’, Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitung (22 June 1987), 32. 37 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 75. 38 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 83. 39 Klotz is shocked when he offers to buy a drawing from Paul Rudolph for $1,000,

which he considered an act of charity, and Rudolph declines as a gallery had already offered him $20,000. Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 149. 40 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 129. 41 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 129. 42 Quoted without a source in Aldo Rossi, ‘An Analogical Architecture’, in Kate Nesbitt,

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ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 348–352, 349. Originally published in Architecture and Urbanism 56 (May 1976), 74–76. 43 Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writing,

Volume 3, 1935–1938. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 375. 44 See Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008), 336–375. 45 Die Klotz-Tapes/The Klotz Tapes, 155. 46 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’

(Second Version), in Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty et al., eds, The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 40. 47 Klotz planned to build several dioramas at the DAM, though these would not be

constructed until after he left the museum. 48 Klotz, ‘Die Revision der Moderne’, 11. 49 ‘Wirre Wunderwelt der Postmoderne’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (17 September 1984), 32. 50 ‘Wirre Wunderwelt der Postmoderne’, 32. 51 Heinrich Klotz, ‘Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main’, Deutsche

Bauzeitung 118, 9 (1984), 10–19, 13. 52 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton et

al., eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 19–26. 53 Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, 19.

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INDEX

locators in bold refers to illustrations and followed by ‘n’ refers to footnote respectively. AA Files (journal) xii, xvi, xviii, xix, 50, 57 n.4, 57 nn.10–11, 57 n.16, 58 n.21 Aalto, Alvar xviii, 85, 86, 170, 194 n.14 Abitare (journal) 133 Agrest, Diana 20 n.23, 22 n.25, 195 n.23, 199, 208 n.10, 214, 229 n.29 Aix-en-Provence 88 Alander, Kyösti 86 Alder, Michael 113 Ambasz, Emilio 130, 214, 220 The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Journal (journal) 27, 79 n.39 Anderson, Michael 146, 153, 154, 157 n.10, 158 nn.26–7 Andreani, Gian Mario 125 Andre, Carl 93, 99 n.21 anthology 101, 201, 208 n.13, 208 n.17, 208–9 n.19, 246 n.42 Archigram (journal) vii, 27, 37, 38, 39, 42 n.45 Architectural Association (AA) xiii, 5, 7, 13, 43–6, 48, 50–7, 58 n.21, 58 n.34, 59 n.50 Architectural Design (journal) vi, ix, x, xii, xiii, xvi, xix, 2, 17, 25, 40 n.1, 57 n.9, 78 n.23, 175–83, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 193 n.3, 194 n.7, 194 nn.11–13, 194 n.15, 195 n.18, 244 n.8, 245 n.32 architectural drawing 11, 13, 47, 78 n.19, 90 Architectural Journal (journal) 139 n.66 architectural model 220, 221, 223, 228 n.24, 229 n.32 Architectural Review (journal) viii, 14, 59 n.42, 90, 94, 123, 136 n.5, 139 n.59

Architecture Australia (AA) (journal) ix, 16, 144, 145, 151, 154, 155, 156, 158 n.23, 158 nn.26–7 architecture exhibition 1, 8, 29, 69, 74, 121, 126 Architektur: Work in Progress (exhibition) 35 archithese (journal) vi, viii, xiii, xvi, 2, 15, 101–3, 105–7, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116 nn.2–3, 116 n.6, 117 nn.18–21, 117 n.25, 117–18 nn.28–30, 118 nn.34–5 Argan, Giulio Carlo 128 Argroup 146 Atelier 5 101 AT&T building 1 Australian Parliament House (APH) 146 autonomy 4, 11, 18, 90, 97, 102, 110, 111, 114, 116, 126, 135, 144, 206, 207, 214, 219, 221, 234, 242 avant-garde xii, 10, 20 n.35, 25, 27, 28, 37, 42 n.41, 54, 63, 70, 75, 76 n.2, 90, 103, 105, 106, 115, 118, 146, 149, 159, 213, 214, 220, 224, 225 n.2, 226 n.5, 227 n.10, 227 n.12, 228 n.27, 235 Bagnols-sur-Cèze 90 Baird, George 149, 157 n.18, 194 n.5 Ball, Alan 147 Banham, Peter Reyner 38, 70, 74, 79 n.39, 81 n.54, 175, 196 n.32 Barr Jr, Alfred H. 63, 76 n.3 Barthes, Roland 94, 201 Bates, Smart and McCutcheon Architects 146

BAU (journal) vi, vii, 13, 25, 26, 27–40, 33, 39, 40 n.2, 40 n.5, 41 n.6, 41 nn.14–16, 41 nn.18–24, 41 n.27, 42 nn.28–30, 42 n.35, 42 n.39, 42 n.41, 42 n.46 Baudrillard, Jean 4, 10 Bauwirtschaftsfunktionalismus 235 Bazar, Matia 134, 139 n.55 Bellini, Mario 135, 139 n.63 Benjamin, Walter 9, 240, 242, 246 n.43, 246 n.46 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 9 Bergamo 88, 98 n.3 Bergdoll, Barry v, xi, xv, 8, 20 nn.27–9, 20 n.32 Bloc, André 12 Blomstedt, Aulis 86, 91, 98 n.7 Bloomfield, Julia 217 Bofill, Ricardo 237 Borden, Iain 200, 208 n.15 Bourdieu, Pierre 215, 219, 226 n.8, 227 n.10, 227 n.19 Boyarsky, Alvin xii, xvii, 5, 13, 20 n.24, 43, 45–7, 50, 52–4, 56 nn.1–2, 57 n.2, 57 n.4, 57 nn.9–10, 57 n.12, 57 n.15, 58 n.29, 58 n.32, 58 n.34, 59 nn.40–2 Boyer, M. Christine 199 Branscome, Eva v, xv, xix, 13, 18 n.1, 25 Branzi, Andrea 124, 131, 134, 135, 139 n.60, 139 n.62 Brecht, Bertold 110 Broadbent, Geoffrey ix, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 189, 194 nn.4–8 Brown, Patrick, Echberg 146 Brussels World’s Fair 85 Burgess, Greg 146 Bush-Brown, Albert 29 Caccia, Silvano 113 California xviii, 128, 131, 164–8, 170, 171, 202 Calinescu, Matei 115, 118 nn.46–8 Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) 6, 17, 20 n.37, 227 n.14 Cantafora, Arduino 131, 138 n.40 Carloni, Paolo 124 Casabella (journal) xvi, 122, 124, 134, 136 nn.6–9, 156 Casati, Cesare 125

248

INDEX

Casciani, Stefano 125 CASE (Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment) 68, 78 n.24 Castelli, Leo 221, 229 n.32 Castelli, Valerio 124 Caufield and Krivanek Architecture 146 CCA. See Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) Çelik, Zeynep 199 Centre Georges Pompidou 231 La Tendenza: Italian Architecture 19651985 (exhibition) 6, 19 n.15, 110 Les Immatériaux (exhibition) 59 n.48, 231 Charney, Melvin 150, 157 n.19 Che Guevara 37 Christo 25, 36 CIAM 86, 88, 219 CIAM Grid 88, 89, 98 n.3 Cohen, Jean-Louis 8, 21 n.42 Collins, Peter 66, 78 n.18, 161 Colomina, Beatriz xii, xiv n.1, 18 nn.3–4, 40 n.4, 116 n.2, 116 n.4, 116 n.7, 205, 206, 207 n.2, 208 n.16, 210 n.34, 210 n.38, 227 n.10 Privacy and Publicity: Modernism as Mass Media xii, xiv n.1, 18 nn.3–4 Colquhoun, Alan xvi, 15, 110, 115, 117 n.29, 149 Conover, Roger 216 Conrads, Ulrich 28 constructivism 50, 54, 86, 182 Conway, Patricia 199, 208 n.10 Cook, Peter 13, 44, 46, 57 n.11, 150 Cooper Hewitt-Museum 223 Coppola, Aldo 133 Crawford, Margaret 199 Crone, Peter 146 cultural commodity 221 cultural production 7, 10, 56, 213–16, 224, 225, 226 n.3, 226 n.8, 227 n.10 Cusset, François 198, 201, 203, 208 n.8, 209 nn.22–3, 209 n.28 Cutolo, Giovanni 124 Dadour, Stephanie vi, xv, 17, 197 DAM. See Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM)

Davidovici, Irina vi, xvi, 15, 101, 118 n.43 Day, Norman 146 deconstruction 49, 198, 203, 204 De Gruchy, Graham 146, 157 n.10 de Meuron, Pierre 112 Denton Corker Marshall architecture urban design 146 Derrida, Jacques 49, 50, 58 nn.25–7, 201, 203, 208 nn.7–8 Desney, Paul 147, 157 n.11 Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) x, 6, 18, 19 n.16, 20 n.37, 29, 183, 223, 229 n.34, 233, 246 n.47 Mission: Postmodern-Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer DAM (exhibition) 6 Revision of the Modern: Postmodern Architecture 1960-1980 (exhibition) (Die Revision der Moderne) x, 18, 233, 234, 242, 244 n.16, 246 n.48 Dimase, Tony 146 Dipoli Student Center 86 discourse xiv, xvii, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12–16, 17, 32, 40, 44, 58 n.22, 66–9, 87, 91, 97, 99 n.28, 102, 103, 105, 110, 111, 114, 117 n.9, 122–4, 127, 135, 143–5, 147, 149, 151–5, 156 n.4, 158 nn.23–4, 160, 161, 175, 177, 181, 190, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208 n.12, 235, 244 n.14 Discourse (journal) vi, ix, 143–5, 152–6, 154, 158 n.24 Disneyland 167, 168, 171 Domus (journal) vi, viii, ix, xii, xiii, xix, 2, 15, 121–30, 127, 128, 132, 133–6, 137 nn.16–17, 137 nn.19–21, 137 nn.23–8, 137–8 n.30, 138 n.34, 138 nn.38–42, 138 n.44, 138 nn.46–7, 139 nn.57–63, 139 nn.66–7 Domus Academy 133, 135, 139 nn.59–62 Dorrough, Terry 147, 157 n.11 Drawing Center 223 Drew, Philip 145–7, 152, 156 n.4, 157 nn.10–11, 158 n.24 Drexler, Arthur 5, 13, 61–6, 68–75, 76 n.1, 76 nn.6–7, 77 nn.9–11, 77 n.17, 78 nn.20–2, 79 nn.28–31, 79 n.33, 79 nn.36–7, 80 nn.45–7, 80 nn.50–1, 81 n.54, 220, 228–9 n.28

Drimmel, Heinrich 28 Dubrovnik 86, 89 eclecticism vi, 13, 14, 16, 63, 65, 67, 159, 160, 162–4, 168, 170, 171, 173 nn.19–22, 179, 182, 187, 188, 194 n.10, 194 n.14, 194–5 n.17 economy of attention 218 Eco, Umberto 48, 58, 87, 98 n.19, 149 Edmond and Corrigan architects 146, 156 Eisenman, Peter vii, xiii, 7, 13, 15, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 58 n.24, 68, 78 n.24, 128, 149, 150, 195 n.23, 214, 216–20, 223, 227 n.10, 228 n.20, 229 n.29, 239 Elle (journal) 38 entropy 90, 93 environment vii, xviii, 7, 19 n.20, 33, 35–7, 39, 68, 88, 95–7, 102, 107, 110, 122, 131, 160–2, 164, 166, 170–2, 206, 236, 240, 243 Epstein, Barbara 199, 208 n.14 essay collection 17, 197–9, 201–6 Exhibiting Architecture: the Installation as Laboratory for Emerging Architecture (exhibition) 8, 20 nn.30–1 Fabricius, Daniela vi, xvi, 18, 21 n.43, 231 Fabris, Giampaolo 135 Fausch, Deborah 111, 118 n.32 Feuerstein, Günther 27, 31, 41 nn.24–5, 42 n.47 Fiorucci, Elio 133, 134, 138 n.49 Fish, Stanley 190, 191, 193, 196 n.29 flexibility 215 Focillon, Henri 92, 99 n.18 Förster, Kim vi, xvi, 18, 20 n.23, 213, 226 n.3 Foucault, Michel 99 n.28, 152, 201, 203, 208 n.8 fragment 96 Frampton, Kenneth xvi, 74, 80 n.49, 150, 179, 195 n.21, 209 n.26, 214, 216, 217, 219, 227 n.20 Frankfurt School 204, 219 Freeland, John Maxwell 145, 146, 156 n.5 French Theory 201, 204, 208 n.8, 209 nn.22–3, 209 n.28, 219 Friedman, Alice T. 199

INDEX

249

Galfetti, Aurelio 113 Gandelsonas, Mario 195 n.23, 214, 216, 217, 219, 227 n.20, 229 n.29 Gehry, Frank O. 50, 123, 128, 150, 157 n.19 Gender xviii, 17, 197, 200, 204, 205, 208 n.13, 208 n.15, 209 n.29 Gibson, Robin 155 Gili, Anna 134 Gisel, Ernst 101 Global Tools (journal) 124 Goldberg, Bertrand xvii, 29, 174 n.40, 174 n.47 Goldberger, Paul 70, 74, 78 n.24, 79 nn.37–8, 81 n.53, 228 n.25 Gough, Piers 150, 157 n.19, 195–6 n.24 Graham, Dan 236 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts xvi, xviii, 74, 214 Grassi, Giorgio viii, 15, 109, 110, 115, 118 n.33 Graves, Michael ix, x, 68, 78 n.24, 149, 153, 157 n.16, 158 n.22, 178, 195 n.23, 221, 222, 229 n.29 Gregori, Bruno and Giorgio 134 Gregotti, Vittorio 20 n.35, 130 Gubler, Jacques 10, 20 n.35, 106 Guerriero, Alessandro and Adriana 133–5 Gwathmey, Charles 68, 78 n.24, 229 n.29 Hadid, Zaha 13, 44, 50, 54 Hadrian’s Villa ix, 160, 162–4, 168, 171, 173 n.23 Hall, Stuart 205, 209 nn.32–3 Hamann, Conrad 147, 152, 157 n.12, 158 n.24 Harvey, David 4, 19 n.8, 76 n.5 Hatje, Gerd 29, 244 n.14 Hays, Michael K. 109, 114, 117 nn.26–7, 118 nn.41–2, 118 n.45, 205, 206, 207 n.3, 208 n.18, 210 n.35 H Dwelling of Our Time (exhibition) 9 Heath, Tom 144, 152, 153, 155, 158 n.23 hedonism 121 Hejduk, John 13, 44, 50, 53, 57 n.4, 58 n.31, 78 n.24, 135, 195 n.23, 222, 227 n.10, 229 n.29 Hellman, Louis 150, 157 n.19 Herzog, Jacques 112

250

INDEX

Himmelblau, Coop 13, 49, 50 history xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, 2, 4–8, 9, 15–17, 19 n.5, 19 n.19, 20 nn.27– 30, 36, 38, 40, 44, 53, 54, 58 n.21, 74, 78 n.24, 80 n.44, 85, 87, 99 n.28, 102, 106, 110, 115, 116 n.5, 117 n.27, 117 n.29, 121, 123, 128, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 156 n.1, 157 n.15, 160–3, 175, 176, 183–5, 189, 192, 193 n.3, 194 n.6, 194 n.9, 195 n.24, 200, 202, 204, 208 n.13, 208 n.17, 209 n.26, 214–16, 219, 220, 221, 225 n.2, 226 n.3, 226 n.5, 227 n.10, 227 n.12, 227 n.16, 228 n.21, 228 n.27, 234, 236, 238–41, 243, 243 n.1 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell xii, 160, 162, 172 n.5, 175 n.9, 173 n.20 Hoffmann, Josef 30, 245 n.20 Hollein, Hans vii, xv, 5, 6, 13, 19 n.17, 25, 26, 27–30, 32–40, 33, 39, 40 n.4, 41 nn.13–15, 41 nn.18–20, 41 nn.22–3, 41 n.27, 42 n.28, 42 nn.34–8, 42 n.43, 42 nn.45–6, 134, 150 Holz, Heinz Hans 110 Holzmeister, Clemens 28 Howe, Irving 76 n.7 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich 31 Hurbrugh, Tim 146 Husserl, Edmund 92 Huxtable, Ada Louise 69, 71, 79 n.32, 80 nn.40–1, 228 n.25 IAUS. See Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) IFA. See Institut Français d’Architecture (IFA) immaterial xiii, 18, 74, 215, 226 n.9, 231, 243 indeterminacy 86, 87, 90, 92, 93, 97 Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) x, xiii, 5, 6, 18, 20 n.23, 210 n.36, 213–25, 222, 223, 225 nn.1–2, 226 n.3, 226 n.6, 227 n.14, 227 n.17, 228 nn.21–2, 229 nn.30–1, 229 n.33 Idea as Model (exhibition and catalogue) x, 216, 220–4, 222, 223, 228 n.22, 228 n.24, 229 nn.29–31, 229 n.34 Institut Français d’Architecture (IFA) 17 institutional critique xvi, 203, 213, 215, 225 n.2

institutionalization 8, 12, 17, 145, 150, 213, 215, 224 International Design Center 235 Irace, Fulvio 125 Irit, Rogoff 198, 208 n.6 Iser, Wolfgang 190–2, 196 n.25 Isozaki, Arata 128, 134, 183, 185, 194 n.17 Izenour, Steven 7, 18 n.2, 150 Jackson, Darryl 147, 157 n.11 Jackson, J.B. 29 Jakobson, Barbara 220, 228 n.27 Jameson, Fredric 4, 18 n.7, 53, 55, 59 nn.36–7, 59 nn.45–6, 64, 65, 76 n.5, 76 n.8, 77 nn.14–16, 97, 99 nn.28–30, 226 n.4 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 19 n.7, 53, 59 n.36, 59 nn.45–6, 226 n.4 The Japan Architect (journal) 73 Jencks, Charles ix, x, xix, 1, 4, 5, 7, 18 n.1, 18 n.2, 19 n.12, 19 n.15, 20 n.26, 21 n.40, 25, 29, 39, 41 nn.9–10, 65, 76 n.5, 77 n.8, 77 nn.12–14, 78 n.19, 78 n.23, 115, 116 n.6, 118 n.45, 118 n.49, 128, 134, 152, 158 n.22, 178, 179, 181–3, 185–7, 186, 189, 192, 193, 194 n.5, 194 nn.10–13, 194–5 n.17, 196 n.32, 235, 239, 244 n.13, 245 nn.32–5 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 1, 5, 18 n.2, 19 n.15, 41 n.10, 76 n.5, 78 n.23, 118 n.45, 158 n.22, 178, 185, 194 n.8, 195 n.17, 196 n.32 The Postmodern Reader 7 Joedicke, Jürgen 29 Johnson, Philip xii, xv, 16, 38, 58 n.29, 63, 68, 76 n.3, 77 n.10, 78 n.25, 79 n.29, 80 n.42, 80 n.43, 81 n.52, 128, 149, 158 n.24, 160–2, 172 nn.9–10, 173 n.16, 173 n.20, 174 n.40, 174 n.47, 208 n.5, 225, 234 Jorgensen, Michael 147, 152, 158 n.24 Jyväskylä Summer Seminar 91 Kahn, Louis I. x, 32, 67, 68, 79 n.26, 161, 170, 174 n.40, 174 n.47, 234, 238 Kaleva Church 89 Kauffman, Jordan 11, 78 n.19

Kaufmann, Edgar 29 Keniger, Michael 147, 157 n.12 Keslacy, Elizabeth vi, xvi, 16, 175 Kiesler, Frederick 33 Klotz, Heinrich vi, x, 6, 18, 20 n.37, 21 n.43, 25, 29, 40, 157 n.14, 170, 174 n.40, 174 n.47, 223, 229 n.34, 231–42, 232, 238, 241, 243 n.1, 244 nn.2–9, 244 nn.11–20, 245 nn.20–6, 245 nn.28–41, 246 n.45, 246 nn.47–8, 246 n.51 Kobayashi, Yumiko 134 Koolhaas, Rem xviii, 50, 149, 157 n.17, 222 Korab, Balthazar 73 Korzeniewski, Swetik 145, 147, 156 n.4, 157 n.11 Kossak, Florian 8, 20 n.30 Kramer, Hilton 63, 76 n.2 Kubo, Michael v, xvii, 13, 61 Kuramata, Shiro 134 Lapidus, Morris 128, 174 n.4 La Pietra, Ugo 125 L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (journal) 12, 118 n.33, 225 n.1 Leach, Andrew vi, xvii, 16, 143, 157 n.15 Le Carré Bleu (journal) viii, 15, 86, 87, 89–92, 98 n.9, 98 n.16, 99 n.19 Le Corbusier xv, 88, 98 n.3, 128 Leo Castelli Gallery 221, 229 n.32 Libeskind, Daniel 13, 44, 46, 47, 50, 57 n.15, 150 Lichtenstein, Roy 28 linguicization 16, 181, 182, 187, 188 little magazines 27, 40 n.4, 85, 102, 116 n.2 Loos, Adolf 30 Lorenz, Marinne 125 Los Angeles 19 n.10, 66, 165–7, 169, 239, 245 n.27 Lucchi, Michele De 128, 134 Lukàcs, Georg 110, 115 Lyotard, Jean-Francois xii, xiii, 4, 14, 18 n.7, 21 n.40, 41 n.9, 55, 59 n.47, 77 n.8, 116, 119 nn.50–1, 159, 171, 172 n.1, 201, 209 n.21, 231 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 4, 18 n.7, 55, 59 n.47, 59 n.49, 119 n.50, 172 nn.1–3, 209 n.21

INDEX

251

Macarthur, John xvii, 152, 158 n.24 Mácel, Otakar 110 MacNair, Andrew 61, 76 n.1, 78 n.22, 79 nn.28–31, 79 n.36, 80 nn.50–1, 220, 228 Maldonado, Tomas 127, 128, 137 n.25 Malevich, Kasimir 90 mannerism 145, 147, 156 n.4, 157 n.10 Mari, Enzo 128 Marjanovic, Igor xvii, 13, 20 n.24, 43, 56 n.2, 57 n.10, 57 n.14, 57 n.18, 59 n.41, 59 n.50 Mauer, Monsignore Otto 31, 42 n.38 Max Protetch Gallery 20 n.37, 221, 229 n.32, 239 MAXXI museum xviii, 6, 19 n.18 Roma Interrotta (exhibition) 1, 6, 149, 152, 158 n.22 TRA/BETWEEN Arte e Architettura (exhibition) 7 Mazzocchi, Gianni 124, 125, 135 Mazzocchi, Maria Grazia 125, 135 Mbembe, Achille 243, 246 n.52 McDougall, Ian 145, 147, 151, 155, 157 n.21 McIntyre, McIntyre and Partners 146 McLeod, Mary 50, 58 n.28, 199, 207–9 McLuhan, Marshall 14, 21 n.41, 34–6, 38, 42 nn.31–3, 42 n.39, 42 n.42, 96, 97, 99 n.26, 226 n.6 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 14, 21 n.41, 34, 42 n.31, 226 n.6 media-hype 218 Meier, Richard 68, 78 n.24, 130 Meili, Marcel 117 n.10 Memphis 121, 126, 131, 133, 134, 139 n.57 Mendini, Alessandro vi, 15, 121–6, 128, 130, 131, 133–6, 136 n.2, 136 nn.4–6, 137 n.13, 137 n.15, 137 nn.17–19, 137 n.21, 137 n.23, 137 n.26, 137 n.28, 137 n.30, 138 nn.32–4, 138 n.36, 138 n.43, 138 n.53, 139 nn.63–8 Merz, Mario 128 Metso Library 87 Micheli, Silvia vi, xvii, 15, 121, 136 n.2, 136 n.4, 136 n.9, 137 n.17, 137 n.29, 138 n.51, 139 n.65 micro-narratives v, 14, 83

252

INDEX

Milan x, xviii, 12, 15, 91, 98 n.10, 109, 121–5, 130, 131, 133–6, 136 nn.2–3, 136 n.5, 136 nn.7–8, 137 nn.11–12, 137 n.14, 137 n.16, 137 n.29, 138 n.35, 138 n.45, 138 n.48, 138 n.52, 237–9 Milan’s Furniture Fair 133 Milan Triennale xviii, 91, 98 n.10, 109 La Mostra di Studi sulle Proporzioni (exhibition) 91, 98 n.10 Miller, Wallis 9, 20 n.32 Missoni, Ottavio and Rosita 131, 138 n.41 Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorpe architects 146 MIT Press x, xiv, xviii, 19 nn.2–3, 76 n.3, 78 n.19, 78 n.24, 80 n.44, 81 n.52, 117 n.26, 118 n.29, 172 nn.6–7, 216–18, 217, 221, 225 n.1, 227 n.17, 228 n.21, 229 n.28, 244 Mizrahil, Monique 125 MLTW. See Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW) Modo (journal) 122, 124, 137 n.10, 137 n.13 Modulor 91 Mondrian 90, 164 Moore, Charles vi, ix, x, 16, 145, 149, 156 n.4, 157 n.19, 159, 160, 163, 165, 169, 173 n.19, 173 nn.23–4, 173 nn.26–8, 173 nn.31–6, 174 nn.37–9, 174 nn.41–2, 174 nn.45–6, 174 nn.48–9, 183, 186, 195 n.19, 229 n.29, 234, 237, 238 Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW) 167, 168, 170, 171 Morozzi, Massimo 131, 138 n.39 morphology 86, 91–3, 98, 99 n.20 Morphology-Urbanism (exhibition) 85–7, 89, 95–7 Morris and Pirrotta 146 Morton, Patricia xviii, 8, 16, 159, 201, 209 n.24 Moustafa, Aladdin 128 Mühl, Otto 37 Munday, Richard 145, 157 n.10, 157 n.20 Murray, Shane 146 Museum of Central Finland 91 Museum of Finnish Architecture 86 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) vii, viii, xi, xv, 1, 2, 18 n.2,

20 n.32, 38, 50, 58 n.29, 61–3, 62, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76 n.3, 76 n.6, 77 n.10, 79 n.27, 80 nn.43–4, 81 n.54, 158 n.22, 214, 226, 228 The Architecture of the École des BeauxArts (exhibition) vii, 1, 2, 69, 70, 80 n.43, 220, 228 n.26 Buildings for Business and Government (exhibition) 72, 80 n.43 Deconstructivist Architecture (exhibition) 50, 58 n.29, 208 n.5 Five Architects (book) 68, 78 n.24, 220 Homes for America (exhibition) 236 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (exhibition) xi, 63, 76 n.43 Three Skyscrapers (exhibition) 64, 77 n.10 Transformations in Modern Architecture (exhibition) v, viii, 13, 61, 62, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76 n.1, 76 nn.6–7, 77 nn.9–10, 77 n.15, 77 n.17, 78 nn.20–2, 78 n.25, 78 n.27, 79 nn.28–31, 79 n.33, 79 nn.35–7, 80 n.50, 81 n.52 Works in Progress: Architecture by Johnson, Roche, Rudolph (exhibition) 78 n.25 NAI. See Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) narrative v, 4, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 19 n.7, 30, 50, 53, 55, 56 n.2, 83, 104, 106, 122, 149, 159, 160, 171, 172, 198, 201, 205, 214, 215 Navone, Paola 131, 134, 136 n.8 neo-classicism ix, 176, 177, 181, 182, 194 nn.7–8 Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) xviii, 17, 20 n.33 Neutra, Richard 33, 128, 234 New York viii, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, 13, 18 n.2, 20 n.23, 20 n.32, 21 n.37, 28, 33, 37, 38, 42 n.31, 50, 57 n.17, 58 n.20, 63, 72, 73, 76 nn.2–3, 76 nn.6–7, 77 n.10, 77 n.12, 78 nn.23–4, 79 n.27, 79 n.32, 79 n.37, 80 n.40, 80 n.43, 98 n.3, 99 n.18, 116, 116 nn.1–2, 116 n.5, 118 n.32, 131, 135, 138 n.45, 138 n.49, 139 n.61, 157 n.10,

157 n.14, 158 n.22, 165, 172 n.4, 172 n.9, 173 n.20, 173 n.24, 174 n.40, 174 n.47, 195 n.21, 195 nn.23– 4, 208 n.10, 208 nn.15–16, 209 n.25, 209 n.27, 210 n.36, 213–16, 218–21, 223, 224, 225 nn.1–2, 226 n.3, 227 n.10, 227 n.17, 228 n.22, 228 n.25, 229 n.29, 229 nn.32–4, 239, 240, 244 n.7, 244 n.26–7 The New York Times 63, 78 n.24, 79 n.37, 80 n.40, 138 n.45, 224, 228 n.25 The New York Times Magazine 63, 76 n.2, 79 n.32 Niki de Saint Phalle 37 Nochlin, Linda 104, 107, 108, 117 OASE (journal) xvi, xviii, xix, 9, 20 nn.33–4 Oberhuber, Oswald 25 Ockman, Joan 161, 172 n.7, 173 n.18, 199, 206, 207, 217, 227 n.10, 227 n.12 Oldenburg, Claes 25, 36 Oliva, Achille Bonito 19 n.18, 126 Oppenheim, Merret 128 Oppositions (journal) x, xiii, 118 n.33, 149, 151, 156, 195 n.22, 206, 207 n.3, 210 n.36 Otero-Pailos, Jorge 7, 19 n.11, 98 n.5 Otto, Frei 28 Oulu 85 Palladio, Andrea 128, 137 n.26, 152, 158 n.24 Papadakis, Andreas 5, 176–8, 193 n.2 Patteeuw, Véronique iii, iv, v, xiii, xviii, 1, 6, 21 n.33, 20 n.42, 43, 85 Peake, Cathy 146, 157 n.10 Peichl, Gustav 25, 27, 28, 40 n.3, 126 Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa v, xviii, 14, 85 Pelli, Cesar 237 Penner, Barbara 200, 208 n.15 Perspecta (journal) vi, ix, xiii, 2, 16, 77 n.11, 157 n.20, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172 nn.5–7, 172 n.9, 172 nn.11–12, 172 n.15, 173 nn.16–18, 173 n.23, 173 n.26, 174 n.41, 229 n.28 Petäjä, Keijo 86 Petit, Emmanuel 7, 20 n.26

INDEX

253

phenomenology 7, 19 n.11, 98 n.5 Pietilä, Raili 85 Pietilä, Reima v, viii, 14, 85–7, 87, 89–93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 n.1, 98 n.7, 98 nn.11–13, 98 nn.16–17, 99 n.19, 99 n.23, 99 n.27 Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company 74 Pleasures of Architecture (event) 149, 151 Ponti, Gio 124, 137 n.17, 137 n.19 Ponti, Lisa Licitra 125, 132, 139 n.63 Pop 12, 16, 33, 36, 106, 108, 111, 124, 126, 134, 160, 170, 171, 237 Porphyrios, Demetri ix, 176, 178–81, 180, 187–9, 194–5 nn.14–20 Portoghesi, Paolo xi, xii, xiv, xviii, 25, 40, 121, 130 Pound, Ezra 35 PPG Industries Foundation 74, 81 n.54 Primo Convegno Internazionale sulle Proporzioni nelle Arti 91 Pritzker Prize 17, 79 n.29 Progrès Technique Architecture Helsinki (PTAH) 86 Proportional systems 91 Proudfoot, Peter 152, 158 n.24 Pruitt-Igoe Housing complex 5, 235, 244 n.13 P.S.1 223 public realm 19 n.15, 160, 165–7, 170 publishing 5, 11, 16, 19 n.9, 41 n.11, 45, 46, 48, 49, 59 n.50, 91, 122, 123, 125, 131, 133, 135, 144, 145, 149, 152, 153, 177, 193 n.2, 202–6, 215, 216, 225 Puppa, Daniela 134 Queensland Cultural Centre 155 Radice, Barbara 122, 136 n.3 Raggatt, Howard 146 Raggi, Franco 124, 134, 137 n.14, 138 n.44 RAIA. See Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Rainer, Arnulf 31 Rashid, Karim 134 Reader-response criticism 190 Reagan, Ronald xiv, 58 n.28, 195 n.22, 203, 208 n.9, 209 n.27 reception theory 190, 195–6 n.24

254

INDEX

Reichlin, Bruno 15, 104, 108, 110, 111, 113, 117 nn.14–15, 117 n.28, 118 n.33 Reinhart, Fabio 108, 113 Reinhold, Martin 3, 7, 18 n.6, 81 n.52, 195 n.22, 226 n.5, 227 n.16 Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again 7, 18 n.6, 81 n.52, 226 n.5, 226 n.16, 227 n.16 Rendell, Jane 57 n.2, 200, 208 n.15 reproducibility xi, 66, 246 n.46 Restany, Pierre 125, 126, 134, 135 Richard, Nancy 128 Rijavec, Ivan 147 Rinaldi, Rosa Maria 125, 139 n.57 Rizzoli International x, 221, 223, 227 n.10, 228 n.22, 229 n.31 RMIT. See Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Rockey, John 147, 157 n.11 Roma Interrotta (exhibition) 1, 6, 149, 152, 158 n.22 Rome xvii, xviii, 6, 11, 19, 19 n.18, 103, 121, 126 Rosenblatt, Louise 190, 192, 196 nn.26–7, 196 n.30 Rossi, Aldo x, 1, 11, 15, 18 n.2, 19 n.15, 30, 103, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116 n.8, 118 n.30, 118 n.33, 121, 127, 128, 218, 222, 227 n.15, 227 n.17, 235, 237–41, 238, 240, 241, 245 n.42 The Architecture of the City 1, 18 n.2 Roth, Alfred 101 Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) 144, 149, 153, 156 n.3 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Journal 27 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) ix, 144, 145, 147, 150, f, 151, 154 Rrachensky, Markus 31 Ruscha, Ed 70, 236 Santa Barbara County Court House 167, 168, 171 Sartre, Jean-Paul 45, 47, 55, 57 nn.6–7, 59 nn.43–4 Savinio, Alberto 130, 138 n.35 Sawyer, Mark 156 n.2 Scarzella, Patrizia 125

Schindler, Rudolph 30, 33, 36, 41 n.14 Scolari, Massimo 11, 223, 228 n.21, 229 n.29 Scott Brown, Denise x, 1, 7, 15, 19 n.2, 30, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 113, 115, 117 n.21, 174 n.40, 235–7, 238 Scott, Nathan A. 93, 98 n.15, 99 n.22 Sea Ranch 170, 237 Sedlmayer, Hans 93, 98 n.14 Verlust der Mitte 93, 98 n.14 sexuality 17, 37, 197, 200, 204, 207 n.1, 208 n.16, 209 n.29, 210 n.34 Shinohara, Kazuo 150, 157 n.19 Singley, Paulette 201, 209 n.24 Skyline (journal) xiii, 61, 76 n.1, 80 n.49, 224, 225, 229 n.33 Smith, C. Ray 147, 157 n.10 Smith, Des 146 Smithson, Alison and Peter 88, 89 Smithson, Robert 93, 99 n.21, 236 Smith, Terry 147, 157 n.12 Smrekar, Ermin 146 Somol, Robert 207 Sottsass, Ettore 121, 125, 126, 128, 131, 134, 135 Space Garden (exhibition) viii, 85, 95, 96, 97 Staniszewski, Mary Anne 75, 80 n.44, 81 n.55 Steinmann, Martin 15, 102, 105, 108–12, 114, 117 nn.27–8, 118 n.33, 118 nn.35–40, 118 n.44 Stern, Robert A.M. 7, 20 n.26, 135, 160, 162, 172 nn.6–7, 228 n.23, 229 n.29 Architecture on the Edges of Postmodernism 7 Stirling, James 16, 67, 68, 78 n.26, 79 n.29, 123, 160, 162, 172 n.15 Stoller, Ezra 73 Street-Porter, Tim 131 Studio Alchimia 15, 121, 125, 130, 133, 134, 139 n.57, 139 n.68 Studio Nizzoli 135 Sturm 124 Subversive 12, 27, 200 Superstudio 124 symbolic economy 219 Szacka, Léa-Catherine iii, iv, v, xiii, xix, 1, 18 n.1, 20 n.25, 41 n.11, 43, 85, 136 n.1

Tafuri, Manfredo xvii, 77 n.8, 102, 116 n.5, 128, 150, 157 n.19, 189, 195 n.22, 206, 209 n.26, 218, 225 n.1, 227 n.11, 227 nn.15–16, 227 n.18, 228 n.21 Tampere 87, 89 Taylor, Jennifer 146, 147, 156, 157 n.10, 157 n.12, 158 n.22 Team Ten 86, 90 Technical University of Helsinki 86 Thatcher, Margaret xiv, 195 n.22 Thun, Matteo 134 Tigerman, Stanley 134, 150 Tinguely, Jean 37 tradition 4, 14, 58 n.21, 69, 70, 105, 110–12, 125, 135, 149, 162, 170, 176, 189, 209 n.22, 234 Transition (journal) vi, ix, 16, 143–53, 148, 150, 155, 156, 156 n.4, 156 nn.6–13, 157 nn.15–21, 158 nn.25–6 Tschumi, Bernard xiii, 13, 15, 44, 46, 49, 50, 54, 58 n.22, 58 n.27 Turnbull, Jeff 145, 149, 156 n.4 Turnbull, William, Jr. 157 n.11 UFO 124, 134 Ultvedt, Per Olof 37 Ungers, Oswald Mathias ix, x, 36, 183, 184, 185, 194 n.11, 229 n.29, 233, 234, 242, 243 USA 33, 145, 244 n.5 V&A. See Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) van Damme, Stéphane 201, 209 n.20, 209 n.25 Van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies xii, xv, 9, 30, 33, 80 n.43, 234, 239, 244 n.5, 245 n.20 van Hees, Emily 128 Venice xi, xii, xviii, 20 n.25, 20 n.37, 41 n.11, 128, 228 n.21, 241, 242 Venice Architecture Biennale xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, 1, 7, 17, 20 n.25, 20 n.37, 29, 121, 126, 136 n.1 The Presence of the Past (exhibition) xiv, 1, 29, 41 n.11 Strada Novissima (exhibition) xii, 1, 126, 242

INDEX

255

Venturi, Robert viii, x, 1, 7, 15, 18 n.2, 19 n.2, 30, 67, 68, 78 n.27, 89, 103, 105–8, 107, 110–15, 117 n.17, 117 n.21, 118 n.31, 134, 152, 156, 158 n.22, 160, 162, 170, 173 n.16, 174 n.40, 174 n.47, 186, 193 n.1, 201, 234–9, 238 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 1, 18 n.2, 68, 78 n.27, 89, 158 n.22, 173 n.16 Verge, John 149 Vernacular 4, 12, 16, 17, 67, 103, 105, 106, 111, 114, 160–2, 170, 187 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 6, 19 n.13, 41 n.11 Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990 (exhibition) 6, 41 n.11 Vidler, Anthony 209 n.26, 214, 217, 219, 228 n.20 Vignelli, Massimo xiii, 135 Vogue (journal) 38

256

INDEX

von Moos, Stanislaus 101–3, 105, 106, 114, 116 nn.1–3, 116 n.7, 117 n.16, 117 nn.19–20, 117 n.25, 118 n.34 Wagner, Otto 30 Warhol, Andy 53, 128, 233, 244 n.5 Webber, Melvin 169, 174 nn.43–4 Weibel, Peter 37, 42 n.41 Weisman, Leslie K. 199, 208 n.10 Wewerka, Stefan 131 The Whites 226 Whiting, Sarah 207 Wiener Werkstätte 30, 41 n.15 Wines, James 13, 135, 139 n.62 Wittgenstein Haus 30 Yamasaki, Minuro 5, 80 nn.42–3, 128 Zanuso, Marco 134 Zentralvereinigung der Architekten Österreichs (ZVA) 27, 32, 36 Zevi, Bruno 126, 139 n.66, 209 n.26 The Zone (exhibition) viii, 85, 93, 94, 95–7