Well, it appears that my essay “Architecture’s Geographic Turns”, a fairly straightforward critical overview of the history of geographical thought in architecture and its appearance in today’s various post-critical and research practices, has perturbed everyone.
Various research architect colleagues don’t appreciate it very much. They think of their work as marking a break with “architecture” proper, which in some ways is true. Therefore a history of cartographic imagery in architectural theory simplifies their work into a larger narrative. Admittedly, absorption is often an after-effect of narrative history. But, mind you, the historical information in my essay was based on secondary sources – by various authors also examining the reach of the geographical image in architecture.
In addition to the above, friendly email banter, a more biting piece of criticism — “In defense of design” (by Mark Foster Gage in Log, but available here online) attacked my essay and the type of work explored in my essay, calling it the “virus” that “mutated the red blood cells of architectural design”. If you thought architectural theories of aesthetic degeneracy were a thing of the distant past, you really need to read this essay! He understands research architecture as a pervasive and threatening influence in architecture schools. One would think the often difficult and critical work of an Eyal Weizman or Laura Kurgan was everywhere around us, threatening the architecture of “wonder” that Gage ultimately argues for. Anyway, it seems the author of this essay truly misunderstood my piece, which was ultimately a CRITICISM of research architecture practices, not a defense.
Finally, and ironically, the most recent criticism of Geographic Turns appeared from an editor who is publishing it in a collection of recent projects and theory writing. The editors of this particular publication asked if the criticisms of geographical imagery in architecture in the essay could be toned down, lest they offend those who map and diagram the environment.
So, you see the binds of writing subtle criticism: on the one hand you’re criticized for defending the thing you’ve actually criticized; and on the other you’re asked to soften your criticism.
“Architecture’s Geographic Turns,” which was great fun to write, ends with a proposition: What if architects stopped turning to geography as a source from which to interpret the world empirically, and instead projected concepts of architectural thought into cartographic worlds? In other words, what if they rewired the historical relation between these fields and architecture entered a new aestheto-cartographic narrative (recall Fredric Jameson argued for something similar at the end of his pomo essay).
Rather than answer that question (or the details of specific criticism) with an essay; I took on the above question in a more ambitious and total form: I just guest-edited an issue of AD that includes writings by some of my favorite geographers, historians and architects. In that issue, which will be out later next spring, we will see work that attempts to craft geographical “Territory” (versus site or autonomy) with architecture.
As always, once that issue is out, criticism is welcome.
The CCA event was terrific. And thank you to everyone who came out — what a crowd! And thanks for buying so many copies of Subnature too (much appreciated). The best part about the lecture was explaining the historical concepts within the book to so many non-architects. I’m very excited about this book’s appearance at this particular moment of debate regarding cities and nature.
Up next, a lecture at the University California Santa Barbara where I hope to expand on some of the ideas from Subnature for a conference on “Design After Oil”. The event is sponsored by the UCSB Humanities Center — a research unit that’s generated some of the most interesting critical interpretations of contemporary culture. I look forward to that.
Following this, I’ll be speaking in Copenhagen about the book at an event sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art and the City of Nantes, given in concert with the UN Conference on Climate Change. Some terrific people are involved, so I’ll send along more about that as it develops.
Finally, the book Design Ecologies is out — a collection of essays on architecture and environment edited by Lisa Tilder and Beth Blostein. It contains my essay “Ape”, a reflection on, among many other things, 19th century street barricades in revolutionary Paris. Check it out.
Tonight at the California College of the Arts (CCA), I’ll be speaking about two recent projects of mine — the exhibition Anxious Climate (curated in 2005/2006) and the book Subnature. The former just opened at CCA (in the “nave” space); and the latter was just published by Princeton Architectural Press. The fun starts at 7:00p. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, please stop by.
I just finished reading “Architecture and Techno-Utopia” (after having read many of the chapters in Grey Room); in one of the many excellent chapters, the author refers to — this brief lecture by Jean Baudrillard written in 1970. JB delivered this address — “The Environmental Witch Hunt” — at the Design and Environment Conference in Aspen (Baudrillard pictured above at left in attendance at the conference with Jean Aubert of Utopie). I recalled how I read a transcription/translation of the address about five years ago; and how significantly it influenced my thought on the architecture/environment interaction. Enjoy.
This post spins out of a talk I gave recently; a question I dodged a bit at the end of the talk; and considering it’s content, it’s also a great way to celebrate this site’s first anniversary!
I often wonder how architectural reconstructions can serve an agitational role in contemporary architectural, urban and infrastructural debates. This is an old question for me; in fact, the very first “experimental historical” project I ever attempted explored the possibility of agitational reconstructions.
Reconstructions, strictly defined in this architectural historical context, are primarily drawn visualizations of the buildings of antiquity — eg. drawings of temples (example above), basilicas, baths. Renaissance architects drew many of the first architectural reconstructions — primarily focusing on those buildings designed by the ancient Roman engineer Marcus P. Vitruvius, of which no surviving remnants remain. In particular, architectural writers of the Renaissance and late-Renaissance explored the possible appearance of Virtuvius’ “Basilica at Fano”. Below, are some of the many images drawn of one of Virtuvius’ only known designs. The first pair are pulled from this article about Fano reconstructions.
These types of reconstructions of no longer extant buildings extended to structures of biblical origin, most notably the Tower of Babel and Solomon’s Temple. An excellent book by Stanley Tigerman (The Architecture of Exile) compiles almost all known architectural reconstructions of the Solomonic Temple.
Within early modernity (1750-1850), reconstructions became more explicitly active components of an architectural theory. The reconstructions of Greek antiquities, in particular those by LeRoy, Stuart and Revett (above), Labrouste, Schinkel, Botticher, and Semper, were intense reflections on key architectural debates. Issues such as structural expression, contour, light, ornament and polychromy, reflected in various reconstructions, touched on concepts regarding the foundations of architectural knowledge.
If all of this sounds peripheral to a more direct architectural history, just consider that Labrouste was paraded by his fellow classmates for his highly personal interpretation of the Paestum Temples (above). Within his reconstructions Labrouste advanced the Temples as part of robust secular society, a radical interpretation of classicism and one that drove many of his own original architectural explorations.
But perhaps the most radical of these early modern architectural reconstructions was the Camp of Mars (Campus Martius, above) reconstruction undertaken by Piranesi. Manfredo Tafuri argues that Piranesi’s “reconstruction” is in fact a denial of the ability to understand the constructs of the city through any rational lens. We can see this reconstruction as aimed against many of those (mentioned above) that attempt to use an archeological knowledge in the name of rationality.
Architectural reconstructions as forms of historical reflection on contemporary architectural problems appear to have dwindled within the modern books and manifestoes that comprise modern architectural theory. Sure, there’s an image of a reconstructed hut or tent here or there; and there’s no denying that such works were important illustrations of core aspects of architectural thought. But these latter constructs (stretching from Semper to LC) lacked any specificity; they were all speculation (all theory), minus a more direct form of historical visualization.
Reconstructions reemerged more recently — in various neo-classical work and neo-modern work. For example, Leon Krier reconstructed Pliny’s Villa Laurentium in 1982 as a way to revive neo-classical concepts within a neo-classical practice. His reconstruction referred back to the reconstruction of Schinkel’s; it was a way to tie methods and style together in what was then, a startling embrace of a seemingly antiquated practice. In fact, without any qualification of Krier’s concepts, his Pliny reconstruction remains one of the most “agitational” of all late-modern forms of this practice. But the agitational reconstruction also reemerged in a less explicitly historicist form; I’m thinking of Delirious New York, in particular; and that book’s reconstructions of the Downtown Athletic Club (above).
In some ways, reconstruction work that appears on htc experiments extends out of these more recent reconstructions (eg. The floating bath project or the air-conditioning map). On the one hand, these projects embrace the antiquated nature of reconstructions (evident within the work of Krier) and yet they attempt to modernize the practice itself (in the example set by Koolhaas’ New York book). Of course, the work on this site (both by myself and others) takes this practice in some directions that differ from this more recent work too.
Where this goes, we shall see. Thanks for visiting this past year. More posts soon.
Today, the New York Times published an olfactory map of Manhattan — “Smells of New York City.”
The map (above) is a more ironic version of the olfactory cartographies that first emerged in Victorian London and Second Empire Paris. One of the most interesting of these is Hector Gavin’s “Pestilent Disease Mist of Bethnal Green,” his map of the odors in that struggling area of London from his book Sanitary Ramblings (1848).
In 2005 I viewed an original edition of Gavin’s map (slightly unfurled below) in the majestic Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University. The reddish brown areas illustrate his perception of the odors of feces and undrained sewerage. It’s an incredible work of documentation, individual curiosity, and olfactory paranoia. It’s also an interesting work of history, as Gavin understood the odors to be products of this particular neighborhood’s past (and this, of course, moves through the New York Times cartography).
Excellent histories of the map, and the history of olfactory cartography include Robin Evans “Rookeries and Model Dwellings” (in Translations from Drawing to Building) and a terrific book by Erin O’Connor Raw Material. You can also read a bit about the map (with one of the finest reproductions we could find) in the chapter on gas inSubnature: Architecture’s Other Environments.
It’s one of those truly under-rated odors. It seems very old books always have it, but in new books it’s a more volatile smell and must be savored quickly. This past week I’ve been enjoying smelling (reading, looking, and holding) an advance copy of my new book — Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. If you missed my description of the book from earlier posts; you can read a little about it here and here. The book will be released in October, so please pre-order and hold tight; I promise, it will arrive soon.
A quick post to tell you to check out this animated history of the Parthenon. It’s quite good, and having recently written about the Parthenon, I enjoyed the dramatic (and saddening) depiction of its bombardment by 17th century Venetian mercenaries. But the biggest tragedy depicted in this film is the dismantling of the remaining statuary by teams hired by Lord Elgin. “She” (the Parthenon) speaks towards the end. Oh, and it’s directed by none-other than Costas Gavras
After writing the earlier post on artist-designed traffic jams, I just remembered one of my favorite projects by the Dutch architect Wiel Arets — his “Boulevard Domburg” (1990). In this masterplan, Arets designed a bottleneck-producing, z-shaped stretch of road, set within a larger highway scheme that incorporated housing.
In many ways “Boulevard Domburg” recalls the early Obus Plan proposal by Le Corbusier for Algiers. But unlike the much more famous Obus Plan (that also incorporated housing and highways), Arets’ project challenges the concepts of circulation driving Corbusier’s and many other modern city planning schemes.
Aret’s project involves something we might term “anti-circulation.” Arets purposely includes a bottleneck, a detour that forces cars to slow to a standstill. Within this zig/zag detour Arets brings the existing town and the seaside into the view of the driver. It enables a driver and their passengers to consider their particular location within the slipstream of an automotive environment. Arets not only brings a new appreciation of a highway’s particular context, he opens up a space, a very interesting space, for other forms of knowledge to enter the experience of driving.
As anyone knows from driving in the United States, there’s a certain direct and palpable relationship between speed and historical knowledge. Zipping through a town not only limits our ability to understand it; the highways and roads of the United States are dotted with historical markers and signs that are comically unreadable at the speeds most people drive. I often recall particular detours — due to accidents, sudden natural hazards, or road work — that led to fantastic discoveries — an old mill town, the site of a famous battle or event, basically something I had driven by many times but never knew.
Arets designed his detour as a critique of modern efficiency, but perhaps his detour represents some larger project that we can harness to better relate speed and history. In turn, one imagines that the detour becomes an aspect of a historical project.
“Can we preserve a traffic jam?” After I spoke at Postopolis LA! on experimental forms of history, BLDG BLOG’s Geoff Manaugh asked me this question. The question was meant genuinely, and also as a provocation, testing the limits of the experimental forms of spatial history that I had just discussed.
Just a few weeks ago, We make money not art, posted a review of the traffic jam created by artist Maider López. López asked a large group of people to drive their cars into a well choreographed jam within a hilly area of Spain (below). The traffic jam looks suspiciously like the traffic jam (above) that stretched from the Catskills into lower New York State during the Woodstock music festival of 1969. This recent project suggests that — yes — it is now possible to preserve a traffic jam.
The terraforming device from Star Trek II — “The Genesis Device” — is a bomb that completely remakes the surface of a planet into a biological and geological version of the earth. It’s like a nuclear weapon that produces an ecosystem. In the video above we see the genesis device transforming a lost moon into a world akin to the Earth.
Genesis is a fictional tool for making nature, but it’s also a system of historical representation; although this latter aspect of the device is completely unexplored in the Star Trek films. Not only does the genesis device make barren moons into a depopulated biotic version of Earth, the Genesis wave generates specific historical landscapes and historical images of landscape — culled from Western systems of colonization and exploration . Genesis fabricates jungle landscapes, large oceans, and mountain ranges on top of a surface that looks suspiciously like the moon.
Ultimately, Genesis creates the double image of colonization: it remakes an unexplored moon into a landscape that looks like unexplored continents. Genesis is really a system of historical representation that makes the explorative vista (the depopulated, resource-rich landscape) appear as something scientific.
Genesis is critiqued in the scripts of Star Trek II and III, but from an entirely different perspective: For the script writers, Genesis represents the dangers of nature made by human forces. I believe the message of the film-makers suggests that the landscape of earth belongs on earth, not elsewhere (btw, this is also the subtext of the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson). For the writers of Star Trek, the freakishness of genesis lies in its auto-generation of earth-nature — aggressive terraforming without consideration of a planet’s inherent nature.
A post-structuralist or Marxist geographical lens provides a necessary critique to the the above critique. Within critical strands of geography, all nature is a production and a representation; Every tree we encounter is, in some sense, the result of a Genesis Wave: the American Parks Movement, Johnny Appleseed, the Lumber Industry, Suburbanization.
One might argue that from a critical geographical perspective, all nature is a Genesis project.
But if a genesis wave is both a system of historical representation and a representation of reality (versus a scientific fantasy) that only makes its effects (and what it represents) all the more interesting.
The fantasy of Genesis lies in the notion of nature authorship: Can we release the Genesis wave from the literalness and naturalism that underpins a large amount of the sci-fi genre?
What if a genesis wave was less literal and more literary, less a scientific endeavor and more a philosophical and historical one?
What if it we understood this less literal force conceptualized by post-structural geographers or architects with a hankering for critical representations of nature?
What if, like the Genesis device itself, such nature-production was never finished, but an ongoing and unstable process? What landscapes would be generated; what imagery produced? What aesthetic sensations the result?
Postscript
The imagery above and these questions have been on my mind lately: In the past four months I’ve slowly been asking a group of architects, scientists, geographers and urbanists colleagues to consider these possibilities (albeit without the Star Trek referencing!) In a forthcoming issue of AD — “Territory” — something akin to the Genesis Wave will be reconceptualized, reconsidered, made into something far more interesting and perhaps aggressive. The issue proposes a type of terraforming outside the science-fictional and within the nitty gritty of the historical and geographical.
As the issue takes shape and as the above ideas become more formed, I’ll post updates here.
[To be expanded for a forthcoming article]
If a stable, humidity, temperature, dust, and pest controlled environment is the ideal setting for preserving historical material, could we produce the inverse environment? In other words, if late-modern history relies on a type of ecosystem for the preservation and study of historical material, could we produce the anti-ecosystem of historical maintenance?
This anvironment (parallel or anti-environment) would be a space where historical preservation was impossible but that would nonetheless be a stable integrated nature. Like a black hole in a historical universe; the eye of a historical hurricane.
So consider some type of room with incredible levels of humidity, swirling dust, and horrible heat. It would be a place that also happened to represent two of the West’s key enviro-phobias — tropiphobia and aridiphobia. This room would be an orangey green place of sweat and dirt where pieces of paper, building elements, and other artifacts don’t stand a chance of surviving.
Ultimately, such a place forces us to reflect on the stability required for history, and the environments lurking in our future.
Continuing on the earthy kick…The chapter on debris from my forthcoming book Subnature has been posted to the right in the “Recent Essays” section. This abbreviated version of “Debris” appears in the current issue of AA Files along with texts by Mary Beard, Reinhold Martin, Thomas Daniell, and others. Tom Weaver (editor of AA Files) and Laurie Manfra (of PAP) helped me transform the initially (and admittedly) raw chapter into something much more incisive. If you’re at all curious about the Subnature book, its tenor and feel, download and check out “Debris.” The book has about fourteen images for each of its twelve chapters, versus the two images that illustrate the AA Files version.
I always enjoy talking to my friend and colleague Ron Rael. Ron is the author of Earth Architecture, an excellent book that outlines the history and explores in-depth contemporary uses of earth in architecture.
Ron’s book is a book about design, but it’s also a powerful corrective to those commentators that view buildings made of earth, or the matter that constitutes earth buildings (mud, sand, gravel, soils), as primitive, poor, or crude. One of Ron’s points is that earth buildings have a far more complex history; describing earth matter as inherently “poor” is often just a way to tie specific practices to specific (often global southern) geographies and histories. As Ron notes, earth is free; but this does not suggest that it is a defacto representation of poverty. In more recent discussions, Ron describes earth as a type of infrastructure. In his narrative and case studies earth emerges as a material with far reaching technologies and representational implications.
Ron’s book is engaged with aesthetics, technology, and history; it’s less explicitly concerned with political problems. But in releasing earth’s denigrating associations with poverty, we are left with more than just “rich” earth; we arrive at a less denigrating poverty of earth that is tied more to the “common” than the geographically poor. When I consider free earth molded into something more than a representation of the poverty of those building with it, I begin to imagine it also being part of a terrapolitical structure — a “red earth.” This earth that may be at some base level “poor” but also open to a new image, much more than “not poor”.
In arguing for a red earth, I’m not arguing that earth holds an innate leftist proletarian politics in its chemical composition (!), nor am I completely arguing for the social construction of earth. I am arguing that our engagement with earth offers the possibilities for new liberatory ways of understanding space, that remain tied to earth’s commonness.
A powerful concept of red earth, tied to its ubiquity and free nature, might be found in the roots of much red thought — Marx himself. In his Critique of German Ideology, Marx understood earth (as concept and thing) as the base of political economic philosophy. In one of his most famous passages, he wrote “In total contrast to German [idealist] philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, we here ascend from earth to heaven.” Marx saw earth (both soil and “the earth”) as the base of his philosophy because it was the defacto element that contained the material and ideological possibilities of society (its nourishment, production, and metaphysics). For Marx, earth contains the conditions of society by society. Earth not only delivers the grains grown by a farmer, but when a person digs his shovel into earth to grow something he or she becomes “a farmer.” When a person binds the earth into bricks he or she becomes “a builder.” The earth is social matter and structure, how we engage with it repeats existing structures and opens up new concepts.
Red earth also becomes red through its potential to release the history of the common, the poor, the defeated. Earth is an endless historical archive of tragedy that does not have to be nurtured, funded, or maintained (like most archives) to hold records of such tragedy. As an archive of social misfortune, our engagement with earth is a barometer of how we come to grips with our crimes. Murder, corruption, and lurking forms of power are hidden through manipulations of earth (from mass graves to buried toxic pits). But these things often reappear through manipulations of the earth.
What is the fascism and corruption that appears in contemporary film but a big earth-burying operation? The justice that often appears in film is a big excavation. Consider some of John Sayles recent films in which the bad guys bury their crimes and the good guys, quite literally, go into the earth to excavate those crimes. Or just about any film that explores genocide involves mass burials and excavations.
This more red earth, that is the condition of society and the history of society, appears in a few contemporary works of architecture. One of my favorite “earth” projects, The Irish National Pavilion is discussed by Ron in his book; it’s a project about history, denigration, and earth. Another more explicitly red project (not in Ron’s book) is the Open Air Cafe proposal by Manuel Herz, which I wrote about in my article “Debris” in the current issue of AA files (and that also appears in Subnature (along with the Irish Pavilion)).
In this latter project (above), Herz proposes excavating the ground of Cologne — site of one of the most notorious bombings during World War II — and heaping the mixture of earth and war debris (held within the earth of Cologne) over a series of concrete armatures for a park cafe. The war debris becomes a type of historical material that forces residents of Cologne to consider the history within earth and the conditions of a future nature in this particular city. It’s a proposal that enables us to see earth, the crimes it holds, and its potential representational structure in historical terms.
This brief discussion of a red earth builds on Ron’s observations. I think it also positions some ideas about earth differently from those concepts of earth and ground in either contemporary green or parametric design. Both of these latter movements see earth as an uncorrupted source of vitalism for a future architecture; an instrument of literal or digital vectors springing out of its surfaces. The earth of Herz (or the Irish Pavilion) is an earth examined (versus generalized); it’s an earth that is historical without being historicist; and it offers us images of earth as both life and violence against life, versus a more flippant vision of life and beauty.
I recently received my copy of Sean Lally’s Energies issue of AD. Sean invited me to contribute an essay that explores some of the recent experimental historical work I completed these past few years, much of it on the theme of energy. It includes new descriptions of my posts on the Plume/Idling project, Urban Ice Core and Manhattan Air Conditioning Map. It also includes an abbreviated version of an aborted text I wrote for Harvard Design Magazine. This particular issue of AD is one of the best I have seen in a long time, and it was great to be a part of it. Some architects I have written about in the past and whose work is a constant source of thought and reflection are included as well. The opening spread of my essay in AD Energies is below.
Another essay that I wrote, and that draws on material from this site, appears in Jorge Otero-Pailos’ catalog The Ethics of Dust for this year’s Venice Biennale (cover below). This essay expands my post on “historical practice”, using Jorge’s upcoming installation at the Biennale as its subject.
As readers of this site know, I’m a big fan of Jorge’s work; it appears on the cover of Subnature. I am pleased to post (below) the latest version of Subnature’s cover, backcover, and inside flaps, albeit in need of a few minor text edits. The designer, Paul Wagner, did a fantastic job interpreting Jorge’s installation as a work of book cover art, and editor Laurie Manfra wrote great copy for the inside and back flaps.
I’ll be posting some new content on this site soon. Some of it expands on earlier posts and one or two new posts will respond to some criticisms thrown my way. I’ll also be trying out some new formats for content; perhaps even making this blog a subset of a larger site. I look forward to more writing and thinking about this site’s future formats in the upcoming weeks.
Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments goes to press next week. I can confidently say that it’s going to be one of the most provocative books in the “nature” section of your bookstore/architectural bookstore/amazon list. What do the following three, illustrated spreads from this book have in common? Check out Subnature, better yet, BUY Subnature and find out!
Now that Subnature is done, I would like to take a break (!); but timing is such that I’m in the midst of developing a forthcoming issue of AD — Territory: Architecture’s Geographical Operations. Final confirmations of authors are pouring in; and some new friends/colleagues will be joining the mix, which makes me very happy. We have a great line up planned, and I will be posting more information about the issue soon, including a description and some work samples.
Thanks again for stopping by. Now that school is out, I look forward to more regular updates…
There is so much discussion of infrastructure these days — from efforts to rethink infrastructure to efforts to rethink buildings as infrastructure, and hundreds of ideas in between. I would like to enter this discussion with another idea, that is not discussed as much — the relationship between infrastructure and history; and I would also like to enter this discussion with a proposition — that we work to produce “historical infrastructures.”
Infrastructure is a defacto element of a city’s history. But more specifically, in a late-modern era, historical knowledge can operate at an infrastructural scale and with infrastructure’s transformative power. To put it another way: history has become an urban necessity in the development of our ideas of urbanity.
First, let me distinguish historical infrastructure from infrastructures that are historical: In San Francisco, where I live, we have cable cars transporting people around various parts of the city; these are also tools of historical knowledge about the city’s infrastructural past. They appear as history, but can be utilized as infrastructure. These turn-of-the-century cable car are often proudly distinguished from tourist busses that resemble cable cars but that are not tied to the cable car system. However important this distinction may be, in terms of my agenda for a historical infrastructure, the point between the cable cars and the busses that look like cable cars is a moot one. They are both representations that offer images of the past, but neither offer us possibilities beyond representations of the past in the present or immediate future. Whatever historical knowledge we derive from them is all statement without method; history without historiography; factoids without techniques.
By contrast, a historical infrastructure operates in two different ways: 1) the representational aspects of historical inquiry are delayed to make the activity of historical inquiry appear first and foremost as the thing represented; and 2) it uses historical reflection to unleash something that was not otherwise possible without this act of historical reflection. Historical infrastructure operates like a water or electrical system, but instead of matter it stitches the mechanics of historical inquiry into a city’s fabric to make history a powerful engine of social and urban life, whose ultimate form is unknown.
Perhaps the closest built methodologies of historical infrastructure are those handful of intense urban historical works completed in Berlin in the last thirty years (many of which were just reviewed in the NY Times). Of these, the practices of architect Peter Eisenman are some of the most powerful, and I would argue there is a trajectory within his work that illuminates the potential of “historical infrastructure” [his work illustrated at the top of the post]. Since his Cannaregio project (discussed in my previous post) Eisenman discovered techniques to turn an exploration of a city’s history into a type of historiographical tissue. In the mid-1980s Eisenman directed this type of work to Berlin, first in his original proposal for the Checkpoint Charlie Housing (the original, unbuilt version being such a monumental project), and more recently in his Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Berlin’s immensely troubling past demands that historiography — the act of historical inquiry — be built into the fabric of the city itself. A memorial as a thing, or as a representation of a past is not enough. History must become the process of inquiry upon which this city’s viability might ultimately rest. Eisenman’s layers of urban grids in the first Check Point Charlie Housing acknowledge this and the necropolis-like textures of his Memorial, place a form of historical exploration firmly in the center of the city. All cities require this historical infrastructure, but a city such as Berlin simply more so.
The concept of historical infrastructure suggests something more than most contemporary discussions of infrastructure. Most discussions of infrastructure treat infrastructure as a technical affair. A historical infastructure can be part of a city’s efforts to rebuild its spaces and systems. And as the examples of Eisenman suggest, such a rebuilding can also be a historiographical technique as much as a thing.
I was putting together drafts of syllabi, and I kept coming across the term “fiction” in specific writings of architectural theory. As frequent readers of this and many other sites know, the term “architecture fiction” has been bouncing around the blogo-twitto-tumblo-sphere. It’s emerging as an alternative and experimental form of architectural writing and as a potential form of architectural practice. Among the numerous discussions of this subject, architect Pedro Gadanho has a new book out on architecture fiction — Beyond: Short Stories on the Contemporary. I look forward to reading it, and potentially reviewing it on this site.
In writing this post, I certainly was not hunting for a genealogy of the term “fiction” in architecture; in fact, I was looking for discussions of “program”. But the fiction term emerged, often in surprising ways.
The earliest reference I found to architecture fiction (a reference that relates to its contemporary use) was in Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. Koolhaas refers to Manhattan and his philosophy of Manhattanism as ” urban science fiction.” This use of “fiction,” also related to Koolhaas’ concept of narrative program, is what we see in the work of Bldg Blog or Bruce Sterling — fantastical tales situated within equally (but not obviously) fantastic structures, each informing the other.
“Fiction” also appears as a more specifically critical strategy in post-war writings; eg. Peter Eisenman’s 1984 article “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End.” In this piece, Eisenman writes of architecture’s enduring fictions:
“Architecture from the fifteenth century to the present has been under the influence of three “fictions.”…They are representation, reason and history. Each of the fictions had an underlying purpose: representation was to embody the idea of meaning; reason was to codify the idea of truth; history was to recover the idea of the timeless from the idea of change….”
Eisenman argues for a “dis-simulation” of the three fictions, which, I think means that architecture’s inherently fictional quality should appear doubly so. That is, the critical architect is one who builds these representations of architecture as a fiction, versus fictional representations of architecture as reality (eg. various strains of modernist or contemporary minimalist architecture). Eisenman arrives at a more critically fictional architecture through strategies such as scaling, grafting, tracing, and so on. A building such as the Wexner Center or his Canareggio project (below) are forms of architecture fiction within this latter definition. The building becomes a set of narratives (minus the “story” evident in Koolhaas’ work).
Most recently, this post-structural concept of fiction has been aligned with the earlier programmatic concept of fiction in the writing of Felicity Scott. Scott uses the term “fiction” in a piece from October, which also appears in her book Architecture or Techno-Utopia. The use of fiction is not unlike Eisenman’s, but Scott reaches for a definition of the term traceable to Foucault’s discussion of history as a type of fiction. If all of this sounds confusing, read the quote below. Referring to the strategies of Koolhaas, Italian Experimental Architecture, and Foucault, Scott writes
“Fiction is not just escape from reality but can produce an engaged withdrawal. Foucault commented on this quality in his own work, noting that ‘I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.” And of fiction’s importance, he went on to explain: ‘I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or “manufactures” something that does not as yet exist, that is, “fictions” it. One “fictions” history on that basis of a political reality that makes it true, one “fictions” a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.’”
Here the Koolhaas idea of fiction and the more critical Eisenman concept of fiction come together. But something else is added. In the above quote, fiction becomes a utopian project, an idea that I think is missing in the most recent discussions. It is a planned escape versus an alternate reality that better enables us to understand what is real and what is not, or simply what could be just for the sake of difference. But what the Foucault discussion also suggests is that historians are active in developing this form of fictional political activity. How that will be staged, remains to be seen.
I just finished reading Anthony Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism; it’s his examination of the historiographical techniques of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham and Manfredo Tafuri, and their impact on the unfolding set of concepts that we call architectural modernity. It was, with some qualification, a page-turner, at least for an architect interested in history: it gives us historians a project, it impels us to operate in new ways, while giving us a new history of our discipline. I wrote over 3000 words of notes on the book in an MSword document! I take type-written notes on virtually every architectural book and essay I read, but the scale of note-taking on such a short book is, in and of itself, a huge endorsement and a warning to readers that this book is an involvement. The following review is exceedingly clipped; but i imagine the ideas of this book will find a way into future posts.
At one level Histories is a defense of architectural history. Histories appears at a troubling time in the architectural historical discipline. Today, many departments of architecture have an antagonism towards history far different than the battle with history that characterized modernity. In addition to the para-historical ideas circulating in contemporary architectural practice, the number of academic architectural historian jobs dropped from about 20/year five years ago to about 10 this past year. In this way, Histories is a memory of the not-so-distant good-old-days when architectural historians piloted “Architecture”.
At the same time, and related to the above point, Histories is a subtle critique on the unambitious nature of contemporary architectural history. The post-war, youthful historians that Vidler recuperates operated in a way quite different than the young contemporary historian of our immediate present. Kaufmann, Rowe, Banham and Tafuri were cartographers of architectural modernity and pilots of a late-modern architectural agenda. Their most significant articles appeared in the types of public venues that many contemporary architectural historians and tenure-committees disdain; they lectured in both the academic lecture hall and in public settings to a complex and diverse audience; they didn’t reserve their most “important” thoughts to weirdly reclusive conferences.
So what type of agenda did these historians establish? Vidler neatly ties each historian to a particular read of modernity which is then transformed, if not implicated, in a particular architectural agenda played out to the present:
The first case study examines Emil Kaufmann; a historian who coined the term “architectural autonomy”. Kaufmann drew on the Kantian notion of autonomous will, as a hallmark of enlightenment (and bourgeois) society. The autonomous object is not absorbed (or “concatenated”) into its environs but appears as a distinct self-reflective procedure distinct from its surroundings. As Vidler argues, such a concept potentially connects Ledoux to Eisenman; but more significant, Kaufmann used such a concept as political critique against the cultural concatenations (and evictions) of Fascist Europe.
Following the chapter on Kaufmann (which is, I think, the best chapter in the book) we read about Colin Rowe and his desire to establish a history of modernity that engages concepts of historical will and development, but that is distinct from a progressivist, functionalist, and technologicalist approach (i.e. the approach of Banham). Rowe arrives at a vision of history, in which the historian uncovers an “infolding” order (or concept) that can be employed for a future architecture — an extension (if not inversion) of Wolfflin that ultimately traps Rowe into his own posthistorical philosophy.
The chapter on Banham may be the most intriguing; in addition to reviewing Banham’s recuperation of the Futurists and his embrace of the architectural program (a concept formalized by his contemporary John Summerson), Vidler offers one of the most unique histories of Banham’s Four Ecologies. Whereas previous critics understood that work as a “pop” history or urban monography, Vidler argues that Banham’s Four Ecologies essentially entangles the rhetorical gestures of Vers une Architecture with the methodologies of mid-century German geography. Such methods enabled Banham to arrive at an Architectural Histoire Autre that matched his interest in an Architecture Autre (typified by his unhouse).
I found the concluding case-study chapter on Tafuri a bit frustrating. In a review of Sanford Kwinter’s FFE, Thomas Daniell wrote that it is difficult to write about Sanford Kwinter without sounding like Kwinter, and I would argue that this is doubly-true for writing on Tafuri. The history in this chapter was not quite the awakening of the previous three, perhaps because Tafuri work is the most historicized in the recent literature, or perhaps because Histories is, itself, the product of a partially Tafurian methodology. Here the methods of the book and its subject come together in such a way that we cannot get a necessary analytical distance.
If architectural history still impacts practice (and I think we all agree that it does), I think the most historically involved, and yet progressive, practices invoke the oft-contrasted procedures of Tafuri and Banham. While Vidler (among other historians) contrasts Tafuri to Banham, we might argue that these ideological opposites spent the last years of their careers focused on very similar problems. Both wanted to reconceptualize the techniques that defined architectural history, because both understood that those techniques were deeply implicated in the possibilities of architectural production. The concluding case-studies of this chapter suggest unrealized and potential closures between the critical and autre methodologies, although this is not an interest (per se) of Vidler’s. The former, but not the latter, is the thesis of Vidler’s book and the ultimate lesson it offers for the architectural historian and the architect. I imagine many people will read this book to understand some of these historians; I hope people considering a career in architectural history read this awesome book to realize the power of their possible, future career.
-
Subscribe to HTCexperiments
-
-
-
Online Readers
-
Please support the following journals:
