Architecture Theory since 1968 / Edited by K. Michael Hays. — Cambridge ; London, 1998

 

It does not seem particularly controversial to mark the beginning of contemporary architecture theory in “the sixties” (with all the changes in political theory and practice, the history of philosophy, the world economy, and general cultural production that the date connotes), for since then architecture, both built and projected, has notoriously been discussed and debated according to theoretical categories, from such blunt oppositions as “white” versus “gray” or “rationalist” versus “historicist” to more sophisticated and articulate -isms. And, since 1968, “architecture theory” has all but subsumed “architecture culture,” for the prevailing sentiment in these years has been that cultural production in its traditional sense—especially the sense of culture as something that one both belongs to and possesses, culture as some precipitate that saturates from top down everthing in its domain, culture as a boundary between legitimacy and disestablishment—can no longer be expected to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but must now be constantly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through more self-conscious theoretical procedures.¹

 

This collection confirms the unprecedented transformation of architectural discourse in which theory displaced architectural criticism and rivaled the methodological importance of traditional architectural historiography (though it has in no way diminished considerations of history as a determinate factor of architectural production; as Marx taught us, the affirmation of the primacy of theory just is the affirmation of history). It also seeks to show the prevailing contours and not a few conceptual details of what many readers still take to be a dim and shapeless mass of texts, for even if the importance of theory can hardly be denied, its historical configuration has not been charted. The chronological rather than thematic ordering of texts here allows the attentive reader to see the weaving of themes, overlaps, starts, and stops that are inevitably reduced by imposed rubrics. My introductions to the texts, which may often be better read as afterwords, attempt to draw out some of their prevalent concepts. And the marginal references point to crossings of ideas.

 

Certain criteria guided the choice of material in this anthology and, equally, characterize what I take to be the distinguishing features of architecture theory since 1968. First and foremost, architecture theory is a practice of mediation. In its strongest form mediation is the production of relationships between formal analyses of a work of architecture and its social ground or context (however nonsynchronous these sometimes may be), but in such a way as to show the work of architecture as having some autonomous force with which it could also be seen as negating, distorting, repressing, compensating for, and even producing, as well as reproducing, that context. Fredric Jameson, speaking of the production of theory generally, has given a slightly modulated version of this: transcoding, “the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or ‘texts,’ or two very different levels of structural reality.”² Or again: “New theoretical discourse is produced by the setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one. What must be understood is that the new code (or metacode) can in no way be considered a synthesis between the previous pair... It is rather a question of linking two sets of terms in such a way that each can express and indeed interpret the other.”³

 

From Marxism and semiotics to psychoanalysis and rhizomatics, architecture theory has freely and contentiously set about opening up architecture to what is thinkable and sayable in other codes, and, in turn, rewriting systems of thought assumed to be properly extrinsic or irrelevant into architecture's own idiolect. And while it is correct to point out that today there still remain vestiges of older, “philosophical” criticisms that simply apply various philosophical systems to architecture in occasional and opportunistic ways, architecture theory has been, in part, a displacement of traditional problems of philosophy (“truth,” “quality,” and the like) in favor of attention to distinctly and irreducibly architectural ideas, and an attempt to dismantle the whole machinery of master texts, methods, and applications, putting in its place concepts and codes that interpret, disrupt, and transform one another.

 

Thus, for example, Manfredo Tafuri's work on modernism and contemporary architectural production, which I take as initiating one important trajectory of architecture theory, enfolds the old Marxian terms of base and superstructure and makes architecture when it is most itself—most pure, most rational, most attendent to its own techniques—the most efficient ideological agent of capitalist planification and unwitting victim of capitalism's historical closure. In a certain sense, this is just the maximization of the classical mediating term of critical theory, reification (or Verdinglichung, as used from Georg Lukács to Theodor Adorno to Fredric Jameson), but now with the twist that architecture's utopian work ends up laying the tracks for a general movement to a totally administered world.⁴

 

Or semiology, another dominant paradigm of architecture theory, links architecture and the social city (often including popular culture and consumerism) through the fraction of the sign (signifier/signified), setting off a fission that leads to the theorization of postmodernism itself, whose dust lingers on almost all subsequent discourse. But it should be clear that, while architecture theory preserves the fundamental structuralist apparatus of the sign, and language as the predominant model of that apparatus, it also, early on, mobilized its mediatory techniques in order to query of semiological systems how, by what agents and institutions, and to what ends they have been produced. Theory's situating of architecture in history and production—or, to use different terminology, its interrogation of the structurality of semiological structures⁵—ensures that any simple distinction between structuralism and poststructuralism in architecture theory cannot easily be maintained. One should note, too, that, while the logics of communication and type were the first products of theorizing the architectural sign, the concept of media—understood as including specific technologies and institutions as well as forms—would by the 1980s become the logical elaboration of that of the sign.⁶

 

Architecture theory's mediatory function releases unnoticed complicities and commonalities between different realities that were thought to remain singular, divergent, and differently constituted. Mediating among different discourses has sponsored a rich literature that addresses itself to a whole range of practical issues—the role of the unconscious, the socially constructed body, ecology, the politics of spatial relations—which connoisseurs of unmediated form nevertheless regard as an occultation of architecture's original object and seekers of certainty find maddeningly frustrating. But a primary lesson of architecture theory is that what used to be called the sociohistorical contexts of architectural production, as well as the object produced, are both themselves 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, which is shot through with ideological motivation. The world is a totality; it is an essential and essentially practical problem of theory to rearticulate that totality, to produce the concepts that relate the architectural fact with the social, historical, and ideological subtexts from which it was never really separate to begin with.

 

There are other criteria, mentioned in no particular order, that guided the selections for this anthology. Though I believe that the most important texts of architecture theory are included here, I have not tried to reproduce the most used texts, or anthologize history “as it really happened.” Rather I have rationally reconstructed the history of architecture theory in an attempt to produce (as Louis Althusser recommended) the concept of that history—which is a quite different matter. I have chosen what I regard as the most robust texts of the authors represented, the ones with the most explanatory power and richness of implication, rather than the best known. Moreover, however influential they may have been on architecture theory, I have not included texts that have as their primary object of study other aesthetic modes (Rosalind Krauss's “Grids” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” are widely read examples, as are Hal Foster's and Andreas Huyssen's different works on postmodernism); on the other hand, essays do appear here by many authors who are not exclusively or even primarily architecture theorists, but all of whom have had a specific and sustained engagement with architectural material. As a corollary to this, I have tried to find entries that treat specific architectural objects, texts, and design practices even while producing generalizable concepts. One of my aims is to show how architecture enables certain ways of thinking that are irreducible to other modes of thought. While any theory that talks about architecture only—that does not relate architecture to the larger social, material field—is practically useless, at the same time any theory that does not articulate the concrete specificity and semi-autonomy of architecture's codes and operations misses a major medium of social practice.

 

But if theory's vocation is to produce the concepts by which architecture is related to other spheres of social practice, architecture, too, can be understood as the construction of new concepts of space and its inhabitation; which is to say that buildings and drawings can be theoretical, seeking a congruence between object and analysis, producing concepts as fully objective and material as built form itself. It is one of the characteristics of architecture since 1968 that a few key projects and exhibitions have explicitly sought to do just that. I have entered what I take to be the most important ones.

 

This anthology is not an introduction to architecture theory (which, if you've gotten this far, you must already know). At least some general background knowledge of the intellectual history of the twentieth century is assumed. Moreover, it is necessary to accompany this volume with some knowledge of the built and projected architecture of the same period, for that is the object on which these texts beat their heads and gnash their teeth. With that knowledge, not only does this anthology become a reconstruction of the history of architectural discourse, but further, the contradictions and aporias, intellectual failures as well as successes of the now highly specialized discipline of architecture theory become also rather precise calibrations of the history of architecture itself. The much decried split between theory and practice, and the tedious laments about theory’s relevance, then lose much of their threat.

 

For the work in architecture theory written before 1977, it is especially helpful to understand the importation and deployment of both structuralist and phenomenological thought as militating against the received models of modernist functionalism and the positivist analyses that had reemerged in the guises of behaviorism, sociology, and operations research in the 1960s. Against these, structuralism and phenomenology each projected questions of “meaning” (it is a prevalent word in the essays presented here) into a structure of sheer relations among architectural elements within a field of signification. Ferdinand de Saussure's disconnection of the sign from the referent may be said to be analogous, in its architecture theoretical versions, to Edmund Husserl's phenomenological bracketing. Both operations suspend the commonsense perception of architecture as a vessel of meaning filled from the outside, or as a collection of behaviors and uses considered as its content. They both install a code of intrinsically and irreducibly architectural elements or phenomena that are related within a generalized system and that individual buildings or projects partially instantiate. In both structuralist and phenomenological thought, architectural signification is autonomous, at a distance from reality, but an architectural concept is still a concept of something; an idealized or total system of architecture is still a kind of map of reality, even if the particular coordinates of that map lack a one-to-one correspondence with the everyday world. At the same time, structuralism and phenomenology come down differently on the status of the subject. Structuralism characteristically liquidates the subject, construing it as no more than an effect of the signifying system, while phenomenology relies on concepts like consciousness and presence and tends to privilege the signified over the signifier, interiority over exteriority, subject over system. In the texts presented here, structuralism and phenomenology weave a difficult pas de deux that finishes around 1983 with the emergence of interpretive techniques that cut across such oppositions and open to a more radical heterogeneity.

 

To those who take the ambition of this anthology to be to render victorious one discourse over all others (that is, the discourse of those included here over those not), it must quickly be replied that the importance of the period in question, from 1968 to 1993, is not one of competing styles or group allegiances (Marxism versus formalism, structuralism versus phenomenology, or the like) but rather of the collective experience of an objective situation to which diverse responses emerged, all attempting to provide maps of the possibilities for architectural intervention, to articulate the specific limiting conditions of architectural practice. I have suggested elsewhere that that historical experience sponsored, among other things, a very particular attitude toward commodification and consumption. For architecture theory during the past quarter of a century seems to have been produced and read mostly by individuals nurtured on popular culture, schooled on contradiction and paradox, and instilled with the belief that things can be changed, that theory can and must make a difference. Highly competent cultural consumers all, these are individuals with some remaining faith in an engaged resistance to “the system” yet still able to be titillated by the ecstatic surrender of the architectural subject to the very forces that threaten its demise.7 But the almost manic mood swings of those of us who do theory, between exhilaration and contempt for the absolute ease with which signs can be redistributed, the blending of euphoria and bleakness with regard to commercial culture, and the desires and pleasures of things, images, and events, which we ingest, it sometimes seems, through almost mindless consumption—all these cannot, I suggest, be dismissed offhand. They are but a reaction formation against what history has dealt us—a totally reified life—and they are but one side of a demand for something different, the other side of which is theory itself.

 

It may well turn out that a different, younger audience, whose relation to consumption is altogether altered, whose memories may not include any notions of resistance or negation, may have to produce another kind of theory premised on neither the concept of reification nor the apparatus of the sign, both of which have their ultimate referent in the vexatious territory of reproducibility and commodity consumption. Indeed, since 1993, there have been important developments in architecture theory not covered by this anthology.⁸ I still believe, however, that the texts included here will then constitute the necessary history on which those new theories will be built. Theory is a practice explicitly ready to undertake its selfcritique and effect its own transformation. And, like architecture itself, theory is an appetite for modifying and expanding reality, a desire to organize a new vision of a world perceived as unsatisfactory or incomplete—such will always be architecture theory's proper utopia.

 

During the course of this book's preparation, I have probably mentioned it to every colleague and student I have passed, many of whom have made helpful comments. I regret that I can formally thank only those who have contributed substantially to the book's formation. Bernard Tschumi has enthusiastically supported the project from the start, made valuble suggestions regarding its contents, and facilitated its development in every way. Special thanks to Renata Hejduk, who helped with the research and coordination of the entire project. Michael Speaks steadied my hand through numerous theory shakes. Luis Carranza, Mary Lou Lobsinger, and Felicity Scott helped research specific areas. Helpful suggestions and information about the general field and particular subjects came from Diana Agrest, George Baird, Micha Bandini, Jean-Louis Cohen, Beatriz Colomina, Peter Eisenman, Rodolphe el-Khoury, Kenneth Frampton, Catherine Ingraham, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sandro Marpillero, Robert McAnulty, Rafael Moneo, Joan Ockman, Colin Rowe, Robert Somol, and Mark Wigley Marshall Brown and Michael Gamble researched the illustrations and prepared them for publication. Marshall Brown and Leah Ray scanned the texts. Special thanks to Peter Rowe, who has helped create a structure and an atmosphere at Harvard's Graduate School of Design supportive of theoretical work in every way. I am grateful to students who have participated in my courses at the GSD for their insights and provocations. The MIT Press has been particularly supportive of this project and tolerant of its size. I would particularly like to thank Roger Conover for his editorial acumen, advice, and thoughtfulness about the topic, Matthew Abbate for his tireless attention to every detail, Jean Wilcox for the deployment of her extraordinary design talent, and Julie Grimaldi for facilitating this publication.

 

 

Notes