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A CRITICISM CONFERENCE AT THE KNOWLTON SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY-----------------APRIL 11, 2009—KNOWLTON HALL AUDITORIUM 10AM-5PM

THROUGH PRESENTATIONS OF CURRENT WORK BY A SELECT GROUP OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS, THEORISTS AND CRITICS, THIS SYMPOSIUM SURVEYED AND ANALYZED THE TECHNIQUES OF DESCRIPTION, DISCERNMENT AND DISCRIMINATION IN RELATION TO THE ISSUES OF ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM TODAY-----

ORGANIZED BY JOHN McMORROUGH------------------------------------------TRANSCRIBED & EDITED BY MICHAEL ABRAHAMSON--------------

Ann Pendleton-Jullian 10Introductory Remarks

Description 14

John McMorrough 16Matter of Facts: The New Casual-ty Revisited

Lucia Allais 26Did Theory Really Happen?

John Harwood 42Architecture as Corporate Ontology; or,The Topology of the System of Objects

Timothy Hyde, Moderator 56Panel Discussion: Description

Discrimination 68

Jeannie Kim 70Winning

Timothy Hyde 78Britain’s Ugliest Building

Enrique Walker 90Under Constraint

Ana Miljacki, Moderator 102Panel Discussion: Discrimination

Discernment 112

Penelope Dean 114Disciplinary Kickbacks

Ariane Lourie Harrison 124Situated Technologies/Situating Concerns

Ana Miljacki 134Adaptations: The Architectural Project in the Age of Postproduction

John McMorrough, Moderator 146Panel Discussion: Discernment

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IntroductoryRemarks

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

I’ve had the privilege of being the director for eighteen months now at the Knowlton School. My main job today is to welcome you here, which I do with tremendous sincerity and warmth. We all of us as faculty go out frequently into the hinterlands to work with colleagues and have conversations, and it’s wonderful to have you here with us doing that as well. It’s a very hearty welcome I give to you.

I’ve been interested for a while with biological systems. Over the past year or so I’ve been thinking in particular about the edge conditions between two ecosystems, especially in tropical regions. I have a biologist friend at UCLA who’s been studying the Cameroon Rainforest, specifi cally the edge zone between the rainforest and the savannah. Th ey’ve discovered an amazing new species of bird, a small greenbull bird about the size of a robin, and the thing they’ve discovered is that this species on the edge has developed a whole series of characteristics or properties that are diff erent from the greenbull inside the rainforest.

It sings at a completely diff erent pitch than the one at the interior so that it can be heard over the diff erent ambient noise in the savannah. Th is is absolutely fascinating to me. Th e bird has also taken on a completely diff erent fl ight property. It hasn’t changed so much its physical characteristics as its mobility and the patterns of its fl ight specifi cally to elude predators, because the predators don’t go into the rainforest, they always scavenge along the edges of the savannah. Th ey know they’ll get these vulnerable species who poke out of the rainforest and then

they can pick them off . Th e reason I’m interested in this analogy is that I think all of us in our careers fi nd ourselves in diff erent positions—sometimes in the rainforest, sometimes the edges. What fascinates me about this conference is the makeup, the people that are involved, John’s description of it was voices emerging that belong to diff erent kinds of critical ecosystems, the way they emerge and create a new kind of dialogue. I’m very excited about the day, I think this is a wonderful group of people to hear talk about this. I welcome you and am very excited to hear the conversation.

DescriptionPanel Number One

This panel considered the question of the act of description as a critical operation in relation to both generating descriptions for yet unnamed phenomena and the re-description of established entities in a new light.

Matter of Facts: The New Casual-ty, Revisited

John McMorrough

Today I have dual roles as conference organizer and participant, so fi rst I also would like to off er my thanks to Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Director of the KSA, for support of the conference both intellectually and fi nancially; for giving us the funds to bring all of these people together. I’d also like to thank Professor Jeff rey Kipnis for providing a model for staging an event like this, and for his encouragement for me to continue the tradition of the KSA positioning itself at the forefront of contemporary debate. I’d also like to thank the students who assisted me with the preparation. Th ose are all heartfelt.

In this panel devoted to description, I would like to start with a description of the conference itself. Th e title of course is “A Matter of Opinion: Th e Qualifi cations of Contemporary Architectural Criticism,” and through the presentations of current work by a select group of architectural historians, theorists and critics, this conference surveys and analyzes the techniques of description, discernment and discrimination in relation to the issues of architectural criticism today. In short, this conference is intended both as a survey and interrogation of the variety and means of scopes—historical, theoretical, discursive and institutional—by which emerging writing is looking at the questions of architecture and design today. Th e intuition being tested is that criticism may emerge, or perhaps reemerge, as the conceptual framework linking together the loose threads of history, theory, criticality and operational thought.

For the “Matter of Opinion”

conference each participant has been asked to make a thirty minute presentation on an ongoing, as yet unpublished text or project. Th ere was no limit on what was to be presented, it could have been a historical or contemporary project, with the understanding that the overall concern of the conference discussion will be on research methodologies and the implications connecting that work to contemporary production more than the particular topics being discussed.

Th at is to say, we’re going to see a wide range of projects today. Th ese people, I think, identify themselves as historians, as critics, as theorists, I myself am trained as an architect, then as an historian, and increasingly fi nd myself identifi ed as a critic. What I really want to do is direct, but here we are.

My own presentation for the conference is part of an ongoing set of projects centering around a conference I helped organize last year. I think you’ll be able to see the connection to what we’re doing here. Th e name of the conference was “Th e Matter of Facts: Architecture and the Generation of Design Information,” and it was staged basically a year ago at Princeton University. To give a bit of the context, there was a conference a number of years ago at Princeton called “Design Intelligence” which brought together a generation of architects including people like Winy Maas, Greg Lynn, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and critics and commentators like our own Jeff rey Kipnis who were working through the implications of this idea of design intelligence, the increased capacity of the architectural discipline

18

to take on ever expanding issues and competencies in its areas of expertise.

Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORKac were charged by dean Stan Allen with creating a kind of follow up to that conference. Th ey brought me into the conversation, and together we tried to work on the formulation of what an adequate response could be to that previous conversation, but also create some distinguishing characteristics. I’ll read to you the conference text that we worked on together so you can get a sense of the tone:

Not so long ago, architecture was consumed with the internalized codes of its own creation. Now such disciplined labor seems, well, laborious. Recent architectural work seems unfettered by its categorical status. It sidesteps the historical divisions of autonomy and engagement, and combines theoretical speculations with everyday work. It engages the world with a mixture of serious levity and strategic naiveté. It combines old technologies with new ones and operates across the scales of architecture, urban design and landscape. Th is is a generational shift of focus from the discipline of architecture to the qualifi cation of the world at large, from matters of form to matters of fact. Th rough the presentations given by a select group of architects and thinkers, the symposium highlighted this change in attitude and the eff ects it has on the possibilities of architectural expertise for today.

Th e decision to title it “Th e Matter of Facts” had to do with trying to work out an intuition that we had, borne out by this statement, that there was a way in which

both engagement with research and facts about the world were still important, but also a kind of lessening of anxiety about the signifi cant nature of those facts. “Generation of Design Information” was intended to be both a group of architects who were working with information design and trying to make a kind of generational grouping, which I’ll talk about more in a second.

In the description of a conference like this as a project it operates in a number of contexts. One of the ones I’d like to discuss let’s call a sort of discursive opposition. At Yale a few months before the Matter of Facts conference, there was one called “Seduction: Form, Sensation and the Production of Architectural Desire.” In this conference a number of young architects—people like our own Kivi Sotomaa, a former professor here, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Mark Foster Gage—presented their work in terms of their interest in aff ect. Th e commentators include people like our own Jeff Kipnis and others. I saw this as basically a group of very talented architects who had benefi tted from a close identifi cation of their work with one another, and the generation of an intellectual scene of which they could all avail themselves both in terms of intellectual support, but also institutional support.

Th e inspiration for the conference I was organizing was to try to fi nd how another group of architects could off er themselves the same sort of network of support but through a diff erent set of interests. Th e idea was to bring together a set of work that seemed to be of the same

DESCRIPTION

19McMORROUGH

20 DESCRIPTION

an aesthetics of information or a science of information. And fi nally the issue of generation, which had to do with the way they saw their historical relationship to their forebears. Th ese were the set of topics or provocations that started to be introduced into the conversation through this conference to make a counter-identity for this group.

My own contribution to the conference was not only populating it with participants and a theme, but also to provide a framework. Th e framework involved a number of projects and interests that I’d like to articulate today because this work is ongoing as an essay and a book. In the time between the conference and now, some of these things have actually been published, but these were the frameworks that the conference and the identity were

generation of the seduction group, but had as yet not formed a group identity. Th e aspiration was to bring together this group with the possibility of testing a plausible group identifi cation. Th e participants included MOS, Scape, n architects, Aranda Lasch, Atelier Bow Wow, One Architecture, Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, WW Architecture and WORKac.

Th e nature of this work is a sort of ongoing interest of mine, and the intent was to simply bring these architects together, have them present their work, and discuss a series of topics. One panel worked on design, discussing the issue of architecture versus design, the stake of disciplinarity in their work. Th e second with information, having to do with the quality information implied within their work, whether they considered it

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trying to work through. Th e fi rst I’ll call a disciplinary context

having to do with rumination. Th is comes from an essay that I published earlier this year in Perspecta that has to do with the disciplinary legacy of architecture and the moment it fi nds itself in today. Th e full title is “Ru(m)inations: Th e Haunts of Contemporary Architecture.” It’s based around the play of words implied by the title. Rumination meaning the ongoing and continuing circular thought on a subject, and rumination like a cow’s attempted digestion of non-nutritious material. I use this play as a framework for how architectural disciplinarity has evolved over the last forty years, and try to talk about its current status today.

I won’t rehearse the entire argument, but basically the idea was that there was this moment of architectural crisis, typically called the death of modernism, that had to do with architecture having diffi culty fulfi lling some of its utopian visions. Th is crisis of thought became internalized in the work of a few architects taking on the notion of ruination. Ruination not only in the pictorial sense of ruins, talking about collapse, but in general the way the motif of ruin started to permeate throughout the fi eld. Somehow this notion of ruination, which itself stemmed from a series of historical circumstances—Pruitt-Igoe, the burning of Bucky Fuller’s Dome—set up this condition to which they were responding at the time.

Concurrent with that on the side of rumination or thought we have the emergence of the theoretical apparatus to

McMORROUGH

talk about the discipline of architecture as an autonomous fi eld. Together these two things combine to describe the fi eld of thought in the seventies, a period which for all intents and purposes seems to be in the past, but in fact what I was trying to argue with this paper was that this circular logic of rumination, thinking about architecture’s disciplinarity and its own codes caused a feedback loop, a haunting image of thought that continued to pervade architectural thinking.

Th e contemporary manifestation I have for the image of the ruin from the seventies being transposed into modern thought today was that of the zombie. Th e zombie for me is a kind of rhetorical

fi gure of the architectural discipline today, both in terms of its practitioners following certain codes that are internally described within their makeup, and over which they don’t have complete agency or control. Th e zombie becomes the fi gure of the ruin in animation, the dead fi gure that has the appearance of life. Th e potential for release from those pressures is found in the way the zombie also, if you think about it as a mass, emergent phenomenon. Which also describe some of the interests that

22

architects today are quite interested in exploring. Th rough the description of the zombie fi eld as an emergent fi eld could start to describe new situations that weren’t created in the precedent of this haunting image. Th at was the disciplinary context in which I situated this thinking.

Th e second aspect of this project has to do with a reading of a society that is increasingly in an apocalyptic mode. Th is has been published recently in Th resholds, the student journal at MIT. In this brief essay called “Design for the Apocalypse,” I’m trying to imagine how, if we look around at the world today with our environmental and economic concerns, what that could do to a conception of architecture that has heretofore been premised by some lingering notion of utopian thought. So if utopian thought is both the good place and the non-place, perhaps architects should start to think about an apocalyptic mode that could replace the utopian mode. If the utopian mode is a non-place, the apocalyptic mode would be sort of an everyplace.

If we try to think about how architecture itself comes out of a logic of excess and plenitude—too much materiality, too much time, too much thinking, too much labor—what would happen if architecture reconsidered its relation to capital and the fi eld of production in terms of a logic of scarcity? How would that start to recalibrate architectural thinking in terms of its performance in the world?

Th ose were the two things that were operating as I was putting this set together, and the keynote that I gave at the

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conference at Princeton, and the revisited title for today, is “Th e New Casual-ty.” It’s causality, but its also casualty and also casualness in terms of a kind of repose. What I’m trying to work on, the current essay, which will become part of the book, is trying to set these issues in play. Again, the story goes back to the seventies as a moment where the failure or death of architecture came to the fore as a mobilizing conceit for the emergence of the notion of an autonomous theoretical discipline of architecture, which as I’ve previously explained still haunts the fi eld.

I’ve started to think of this notion of death and extinction not as the fi nal cataclysmic occurrence in the fi eld, but a periodic reoccurrence. Perhaps instead of trying to think of architecture as a single continuity unifi ed from the pyramids to today, instead we’ve historically suff ered a series of extinctions of a conception of architecture. Th ese are replaced with something that has the same name, it’s still called architecture, but actually has an entirely diff erent logic and genesis. I’ve tried to position this new causality and casualty in relationship to these historical forces.

Th e argument drawing from the previous work is that we know the last big economic downturn in a huge global sense—the oil crisis—was in the seventies. Th e reaction to this in architecture was a bifurcation into two opposing camps. Th ese two camps I represent with the image of Eisenman’s House III and of the underground building. On the one hand we have architecture becoming increasingly codifi ed—a retreat into the academy—as a way of working on the problems of architecture without the exigencies of environmentalism, without the diffi culties of the world proper. Th is creates a sense of enclosure in order to work on its codes and a sense of depth and purpose. On the other hand we have the people who leave that behind and start to work on environmental issues, on form being a subcategory of the notion of performance.

Out of this bifurcation we get two opposing ways of thinking about the creation of architecture that have really operated in two separate and discrete realms. If we think about Dubai, which I think is an image of what has happened since the last oil crisis. Th e oil crisis created the possibility of a closed culture of architectural expertise, but at the same time the rise in oil over the intervening years created vast repositories of capital such that work that had been forged in the early seventies and grown in terms of imagining and inventing new worlds of architectural production are subsequently fulfi lled by the promise and the funding of capital itself through oil.

With Dubai I think we see the apotheosis of that whole direction, things

23McMORROUGH

that are designed with a sense of removal from the world now being built in the world itself. Th e argument I’m trying to make is that these ideas are now being tested in the world very late in their production. Fully-fl edged, fully-formed architectural ideas now coming to fruition. Dubai becomes a kind of catalogue of the avant-garde of the last thirty years paid for by the oil reserves.

At the same time there is a sense of

the apocalyptic mode, these pressures on the situation that say these models are no longer sustainable. We can look at the growing confederation of causes and pressures that are again going to bring to the fore a historical repetition of the same kind of issues we faced in the seventies in terms of how architecture will now position itself in terms of a world at crisis. What is architecture going to do about it?

So that is the set of contexts that were informing the new causality: in a disciplinary context in terms of rumination, in society in terms of an apocalyptic mode, and that produces a new way of thinking than the previous generation that lead to a bifurcation between technology and thought. Maybe

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the new condition can lead to a kind of synthetic rereading of that material.

As far as the book has gotten is a Sketch-Up model, and this is a sort of re-kicking-off of that eff ort. Some of the issues are editorial, because I think in this notion of identifi cation there’s an issue of how you take this to press, how you organize it and things like that, but also—and this is why it’s an ongoing project for me—in the intervening year all the things that I was theoretically interested in, the slightly cheeky notion of an apocalyptic mode, have become all too real and serious as the crisis increases. What was a sort of rhetorical trope I feel has slightly more immediate gravity in terms of the situation, and I’m trying to work through that. In a way it’s a fulfi llment of the earlier prediction, but has also caused me to reconsider how to set that up.

Th at brings us back to the issue of the conference itself. True to my word, this is a sort of ongoing, loose project that I’ve presented today, but I wanted to say that one thing that came out of the conference that was interesting for me was a posting that was made on the site Archinect, a blog posting, that actually occurred three days before the conference itself, in reaction to the initial statement. I’ll quote, “No matter how much architecture’s charge has changed in the last few years, the changes don’t always reach our core. Th e mission statement of this progress-touting conference has defi nite baggage; a bombastic demeanor written in code.” And that’s from “chip.”

I was really fascinated by that, not so much for its criticism of the conference

or its baggage, because I do think the baggage is what we have. Dealing with our baggage is exactly what the conference is about for me. What struck me was this thing about it being written in code. For me this raised the issue of writing. Writing about architecture is how we think about architecture, and is the location for description today. I wasn’t personally off ended by the attack on the tone, but it did get me to start thinking about how we do write about architecture? If we’re looking at a situation in which we think architecture is going to recalibrate itself, what’s going to be the impact not necessarily directly on writing, but how will the writing of criticism, history and theory recalibrate as well?

Th at brings us back to this conference, which to me is working through the implications of the previous conference, as well as an application of that model to this question not for design per se, but for writing and thinking about design. Again, the purpose of this conference is to bring together an emerging group of writers whose work, in a variety of ways and means speaks of the relationship of architectural scholarship to architectural production today. Th e aspiration is to test the plausibility of new generational identities on emerging thinkers through their overlaps of work and interest. It’s a heady ambition of course, that can only be partially, and admittedly inconclusively addressed in the course of a brief conference. Nevertheless I’m hoping for an interesting and positive exchange.

McMORROUGH

Did Theory Really Happen?

Lucia Allais

First of all, thanks, John, for inviting me. Really; thanks for having a workshop—the idea of a workshop being that you can present fresh stuff and hear what other people think. You can take that as a disclaimer, too: this is fresh stuff , so be lenient, but tell me what you think. Th e title of my paper has changed from “Dictionary Entry,” to “Did Th eory Really Happen?” It’s still about the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, which was formed by Peter Eisenman in 1967 and is rapidly being historicized as the birthplace of American architectural theory. I assume everyone knows the Institute. If you don’t, the working defi nition for me will be the one given in the Village Voice in 1982: “Th e IAUS helped make American architecture arty, international and intellectual.” I’ve been asked to write a dictionary entry about the IAUS and I’m also writing a shorter article about it. Both these things have gotten me thinking about how we write the history of theory. Again, the advantage of a workshop is that you can say things perhaps more forcefully orally than you would put down on paper.

From the literature on the history of American architectural theory, one certainty has emerged: the history of theory begins in 1968. “It does not seem particularly controversial,” writes Michael Hays, “to mark the beginning of contemporary architectural 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.” With this connotative defi nition of history, Hays avoids

historicizing a genealogy that did so much to question the claims of historicism. Hays borrows this connotative strategy, indeed the entire sentence, from Fredric Jameson’s 1984 text “Periodizing the Sixties.” Jameson writes, “It does not seem particularly controversial to mark the beginnings of what will come to be called the 1960s in the Th ird World, in the great movement of decolonization of British and French Africa.”

It’s because theory has taught us to reject what Hays and Jameson both called “history as it really happened,” that Hays contents himself with a single historical gesture, and that is to say: “since 1968.” Joan Ockman recently takes the same approach in the recent issue of Log on 1968—she’s not the only one, just a prominent fi gure—when she appeals to Jameson to set aside what she calls “history as it really was,” and look instead for “a concept of that history.” Th is attack on history as it really happened is really an attack on the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historical objectivity. Ranke was the fi rst to say that historians should not pass judgment on history, but instead go to the archive and then recount in the most intimate detail history “as it really happened”—“wie’es eigentlich gewesen.”

I know this is not the place for a pedantic display of historiography, but let me just read some book titles so you get the point. Th ese are the books that Ranke wrote: History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations fr om 1494 to 1514; Th e Princes and Peoples and Southern Europe; Th e Roman Popes in the Last Four Centuries; et cetera.

28

Clearly this is political history. So when we reject the motto “history as it really happened,” what we’re really rejecting is the idea that the political sphere has primacy in the writing of history.

Th e opposite pole of this objectivist history is usually occupied by Jacob Burkhardt. His most famous book is Th e Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; he is the inventor of cultural history. So you get the picture: world history faithfully recalls political events, cultural history recounts an atmosphere, an artistic tendency, to detect larger cultural patterns. Th e number of architects featured in Ranke’s history is of course low. In contrast, Burkhardt used an architect, Alberti, as his model for the universal man. So when Ockman, Hays, Jameson and the rest of us reject the idea of telling history as it really happened, the message is that we should be engaging in the Burkhardtian project.

But for all this reliance on connotation, there’s always an element of denotation left in these accounts; crucial details that are left in to create what Barthes called a “reality eff ect.” For Jameson it’s the appeal to colonization, for Hays and Ockman it’s just the date 1968. Th e attachment to the date 1968 is a reality eff ect that takes the place of any real political events. Another signifi cant source of reality eff ect are the memories of the protagonists of 1968. So there is now a whole generation of people who are on a tour to give away their memories of what happened. Ironically, all this cultural history has created a myth of origin that is consistent with what these protagonists actually recall really happened. And

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to make matters worse, what “really happened” is itself described in terms of a retreat from reality into theory. So the idea is that contemporary theory was born from a retreat from reality into theory. Here I could quote Bernard Tschumi, who says “Aft er 1968, nobody wanted to call himself an architect anymore.” Stan Anderson has a more theoretical version, which says, “we were afraid of instrumentalization, so we went to look for autonomy.” Th at’s the basic story.

We have, in other words, been left with a real and a theoretical 1968. Th e fi rst is a massive geopolitical break; it’s made of rebellions, assassinations, wars and elections. Th e second is a transatlantic literary event; it’s made of –isms and institutes, issues and disciplines. Th e real 1968 is real in the Lacanian sense; it is a long lost dramatic past. Th e theoretical 1968 is theoretical in the Althuserrian sense of an epistemological regrounding.

If this description of the birth of theory has been uncontroversial, it has not helped to explain how theory became a very real cultural institution aft er 1968. Did theory “subsume architectural culture”—this is Hays’s version—or did it compensate for a lack of politics, which is what Ockman implies? Are we to believe that theory just “happened”? Nobody is saying that nothing happened, it’s just that the impulse to describe what happened is described as an anti-theoretical gesture. Th ese questions point us beyond the foundational texts of theory, and beyond the memory of those who wrote them: to the institutions that supported this supposed retreat away from reality, and

29ALLAIS

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to the role played in this entire discursive framework by actors who were not authors.

Today I want to come down on the side of world history, for the sake of argument, or rather that for the sake of building a better cultural history. We have to get better at choosing our reality eff ects. A side note on my motivations: I purposely set this up using arcane German fi gures to distance myself from the current debates on the history of theory, particularly those in the American left between Pragmatism and Marxism, Jameson and Rorty, Hays and Ockman. Th is is not my project. My motivations are much more selfi sh: as a historian who’s writing a history of cultural institutions—more mainstream cultural institutions, “world historical” ones like the UN, my goal is to fi nd a historical method that works for both mainstream institutions and for the avant-gardes like this one. Th is comes in part from occupying the disciplinary position of a diplomat. I’m the only architectural historian at the Society of Fellows and it has become apparent that in order to be taken seriously by other disciplines we have both our desire to value theory from within, but must also be able to talk to historians who have a perfectly legitimate expectation that what we actually talk about is architecture.

Th e last caveat is that this is not my main project. I did go to the archives just by coincidence, and there are many people who are working on this archive. Some are making it their doctoral dissertation, others their sort of swansong, some the crowning event of their careers. For me,

I’m happy to take what is another’s central project and use it as an experimental test case.

I’m going to present three diff erent types of material that can be found in the archives of the IAUS. First, an event that fi ts uncomfortably in the established narrative. Th e question here is, why is ‘68 depicted as a white, and European, event? I’ll then talk about the institutional history of the IAUS, describing the encyclopedia entry which is in some ways pure cultural history but also pure reality eff ect. Lastly, I’ll show some visual material produced in the Institute’s early days. Th e question will be what did theory look like before it was theory? Before it was published in Oppositions in 1973, it looked like social scientifi c diagrams and grant applications.

I begin in ’68. And in order to properly dramatize the idea of ’68 as a date when something “really happened,” I begin with a project that never happened. Sometime in August 1968, Peter Eisenman tore off a piece of yellow trace and wrote in capital letters, “Harlem Plan.” He inked over pencil lines and fi nalized an organizational chart that linked the New York Urban League, a Harlem school and his own institute. Th is was to be a new educational mechanism in Harlem, and in the attached grant proposal, Eisenman started from a basic equation:

Black America is in essence urban America. Whether by default or design, the cities have been left to the urban blacks. Today they represent the only true urban culture that has been left in this country.

31ALLAIS

A window of opportunity had been opened for a combined solution to two separate problems: the failure of modernist urbanism and the disenfranchisement of the ghetto. Th e argument is worth quoting at length:

Th e Black American needs a myth, something to believe in, something which will give structure and meaning to his life. Th is cannot be a literal or oversimplifi ed mythology such as the study or belief in African history. It would seem that such a myth must come from the encompassing structure of the black community and the black individual. It is here that the equation of black America and urban America becomes critical. Th e modern city, the utopia on earth, has been the dream if not the reality of much contemporary thought and work in the areas of city planning and community development. For various reasons […] there was no realistic movement. […] However, there is an opportunity now. Th ere is not one aspect in the range of urban problems which has the potential power and image value that could be useful in creating a black myth more important than creating a new physical environment for the twentieth century city. And there is no reason why this cannot rightly be called a black responsibility.

Th is is followed by concrete proposals for a school in Harlem, which would teach black kids how to be architects, “drawing out knowledge” about their city, and re-projecting it onto the city itself, in a “model block.”

Th is isn’t the Eisenman to which we’ve been accustomed. It’s not the

unrepentant formalist, not the dedicated postmodernist, not the solipsistic designer, not the paper architect. Here we have a clearly stated analysis, and an assertively proposed collaborative solution. To be sure, the language is paternalistic, the argument culturally insensitive, and the discourse totalizing. So the black American is merely the carrier of a degree zero subjectivity that provides access to deeper structure. But, on the other hand, modern architecture is not treated more kindly. Th e twentieth century city is a failure. Eisenman readily surrenders it to a given constituency as a gesture, as an emergency measure, against alienation. Unlike in modernist planning, the modern utopia on earth is not an instrument of technocracy, it’s an iconographic fi x to a mythological bankruptcy.

Most out of character perhaps is the implied pragmatism of the argument. Th e theory depends on a series of conditions for action: an opportunity. Th e black American and the twentieth century utopia have demanded in vain to be taken as ends in themselves. Instead, they can succeed by becoming each others’ means, by instrumentalization. For the League’s youth, the initiation of the black myth of the future city would yield empowerment. For the architects, it would deliver design work. What are we to make of this?

Unlike the Institute, the Urban League was a venerable organization with deep roots in America’s cities and had been empowered in ’64 with large amounts of federal funds. Aft er ’68 it veered away from legal activism towards hands-on pressure, changing its logo to refl ect its larger ambitions. Because the director of

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the New York chapter was a protégé of Adam Clayton Powell, the League also controlled well-funded experimental education programs. It is these funds that Eisenman hoped to channel toward the Institute. Here the line between theoretical pragmatism and fi nancial opportunism begins to blur. But must we therefore paint a sinister picture, of the Institute co-opting the cause of a disenfranchised population just to get money?

Th e answer is complicated both by the sequence of events and by the pragmatic tendencies of the League itself. It was the League’s president who had fi rst approached Eisenman to invite him to participate in the creation of a think tank called the “Black Leadership Institute,” devoted to forming a “radically diff erent person, a philosopher-technician, able to think, operate and put into eff ect, with the ability to do so in both worlds: America at large and the inner city in particular.” In other words, the League was searching for a radical rewriting of black urban subjectivity too, and architecture was to be its technique. If you look at the list of participating intellectuals, there’s only Eisenman from a technical discipline and that’s architecture. Everything else was to be “law” or “the history of the black nation.” In this sense, Eisenman’s description of the ghetto as a place to grow a new mythology took a cue from the League itself and capitalized on the alignment of their inspirations.

Th e project was never realized. But this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any intellectual legitimacy. Does this text really qualify as a piece of architectural theory,

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or is it merely an exercise performed for the sake of institutional legitimacy? As an institution-building activity, the Harlem Plan fi ts uncomfortably in the established history of the IAUS, particularly the history of what Ken Frampton has called the “shotgun marriage” between MoMA and the Urban Design Corporation, the two institutions that brought the Institute together.

Consider the better-known Harlem project that sparked the creation of the Institute: the 1966 New City show at the MoMA where Arthur Drexler assigned hypothetical sites to four Ivy League teams and exhibited the results. Th e show earned the architects accusations of being both too detached and not utopian enough, and of having unleashed their will to form onto an unsuspecting New York.

In contrast, in the Urban League, the will to form was off ered to a specifi c

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constituency as a gesture of empowerment. Th e off er was not unconditional. Eisenman resisted any connection to the teaching of black history, lest Harlem be “rebuilt in the image of an African village.” Asking for the teaching of black history was a very common cause in this period, as a way to support the idea that Harlem was an internal colony that deserved autonomy and control of its school system.

By calling for replacing African mythology with the modernist myth of the city, Eisenman was compromising between the League and MoMA. Th is is, in other words, a combination of two kinds of autonomy: one aesthetic, the other political. Th is is a kind of post-MoMA ghetto formalism, which of course was never realized. Nor does Eisenman’s 1968 proposal for a new black myth work well as a precedent for the way the Institute eventually theorized myth or the urban. Myth became the preferred pejorative term for an unexamined ideology in the seventies, the prime example being functionalism. Using the term myth to designate modernism’s theoretical error was meant to eradicate the illusion that architects have any political agency of exactly the kind the Harlem Plan proposed to give to the black architect. Similarly, in the 1976 volume On Streets, which aimed to reclaim streets as “components of the urban environment,” the inhabitant was the recipient in a kind of disciplinary experiment. In contrast, the Harlem Plan was to be a part of the Urban League’s Street Academy experiment which started in 1965 to build walk-in schools for dropouts in abandoned storefronts.

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Each Street Academy was sponsored by a corporate donor. Th e League advertised their visibility on the streetscape as a new type of philanthropy which signaled “the end of the so-called genius academic, the era of corporate responsibility.”

Th e Harlem Plan was never realized. Th e correspondence between Wingate and Eisenman ends abruptly in 1968, and with a few denotative and connotative hints, we can understand why. On the connotative side, there’s the Democratic Convention in Chicago, with its riots, later that year New York City gets polarized in a debate between Jewish teachers and black parents, forcing the League to take a very public stance against the use of white expertise in education. On the denotative side, there is a major corruption scandal in the New York Urban League, and further confl icts of interest might have been encountered anyway. Already in 1968, the Urban League’s student newspaper satirized a project supported by Ed Logue and Nelson Rockefeller, an eventual patron for the Institute. Th ere were bound to be problems anyway.

Still, the collaboration reveals very plainly why there was a U in the IAUS: because Urban was a category of funding in 1968 that you could not do without. Th is project arose when, for a brief moment, two totally diff erent Institutes sought both to take advantage of funds for urban research and to make something of the fact that “urban” was a socio-scientifi c euphemism for “black.” Th e Urban League called the bluff by trying to get involved in urbanism; the Institute called the bluff by trying to get involved in black aff airs.

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Th at’s how far this paper has gotten, but the idea of urban as a category of funding brings me to the encyclopedia entry and to the institutional model of the IAUS. I’m writing a dictionary entry, it’s for an Italian dictionary, the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Architecture, it’s going to be three volumes. In contrast to previous editions there will be no monographic entries, just places. By places, they mean specifi c buildings, institutes, schools of thought, events, et cetera. Writing a dictionary entry turns out to be a very tedious exercise; decisions are about where to locate information. For example, I’m very proud to say that the Whites versus Grays debate only makes it in the penultimate paragraph because I think putting it up front—although it appears

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in front in chronological terms—would oversimplify the rest of the entry.

Overall, though, the exercise is one of organization. Th e only opportunity for an original contribution is for theorization of the institutional hybridity of the Institute. Th is hybridity is something that people have been talking about all along. In 1967, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that she hoped the Institute would “provide a link between aesthetics and sociology.” In its heyday, Paul Goldberger reported that the Institute was “an odd combination of the theoretical and the pragmatic.” In the mid-seventies the Institute publicized itself as a “halfway house between school and offi ce.” And more recently Ken Frampton came up with the phrase “shotgun marriage.” Th ere’s one paragraph in which I off er my own

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contribution:

Th e IAUS was not Eisenman’s fi rst attempt at a collective. In 1965 he had founded CASE (Conference of Architects for the Study of Environments). Th is was based loosely on Team X, but Eisenman soon found that the group lost its “organic connection” and founded the IAUS in part to rectify this “mistake.” Unlike the democratic conference model, the Institute’s structure allowed Eisenman to retain control (he remained director until 1983) and to tailor collaborations. Like the myriad other think tanks, research centers and policy institutes that proliferated on the North American coasts in the 1970s, the Institute was less a professional assembly than a nucleus of experts which brought overlapping networks periodically into contact. Th ree phases can be outlined in its institutional history.

Th e next three sections are divided chronologically. So three kinds of projects—urban projects, theoretical projects and public projects. But they are really three think tank typologies, that are borrowed from the literature on think tanks. I’ll read the fi rst sentence in each one of those paragraphs. What follows aft er that is just a description of the work. “Between 1967 and 1974, the Institute functioned as a government contract research institution producing urban projects for public clients.” So you have to think Rand Corporation, Urban Institute. Th en I talk about the urban work of the IAUS.

Next paragraph. “Starting in 1973 with the publication of Oppositions

(a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture), the inauguration of an undergraduate program (in association with fi ve liberal arts colleges) and the move to a larger space, the IAUS began to function as an academic research institute in dialogue with international partners, hosting fellows with public and private funds.” Here you have to think Institute for Advanced Studies, the foreign academies, and a Manhattan campus for other schools like Cornell. Th en I go on to talk about Oppositions and the theory as such.

Next paragraph, “In 1978, with the launch of the monthly design newspaper Skyline, the overhaul of the public lecture series program Open Plan (with the help of a massive NEH grant) the intensifi cation of the exhibition schedule and the launch of a book series, the IAUS became a veritable cultural center, and international gateway for foreign visitors and a regional venue for New York architects.” Basically this is when the Institute started thinking that what it was doing was putting “architecture” in “American culture.” I’m showing here a diagram the Institute started using in 1978 to promote itself as a bridge between the private and public sectors. Th e cultural functions are displayed in the center, between the R&D department and the educational component. My contribution consists in saying that there was a chronological shift between the three functions.

Th is is important not only because the Institute famously defi ned itself in terms of its independence, but also because it confl ated this independence with its infl uence. In the mid-seventies,

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for example, “the Institute is ideally suited to coordinating theoretical ideas with practical constraints. It has the potential to infl uence other institutions and other studies outside the specifi c context of study.” So if the Institute’s main selling point was its fl exibility and its infl uence, my point is that this hybridity was not a stable condition but a progression that eventually led to a signifi cant crisis. Th is is clearly legible if you map the type of funds that were received by the Institute over the course of fi ft een years. You can see the three phases very clearly, although there is a bit of a delay because you get funds a year aft er you apply for them. I’ll come back to this in a minute, but fi rst I want to say why it’s important to identify the institutional model of the Institute.

Because, and I quote from my own dictionary entry, “From its earliest days, the Institute’s vanguardism was consistently taken for willful elitism. Some critics perceived a return to the idea of “architecture as art.” (this is Mary McLeodOthers detected a debasement of American architecture into a “cultural industry.” (this is George Baird). Many interpreted the “intellectualization of architecture” through European theory (this is Jean-Louis Cohen)as gesture of political neutralization, akin to the one operated in 1932 when MoMA purged modernism of its political and social ambitions in order to bring it to an American public as the International Style.’ Th e analogy is supported by the Institute’s association with MoMA and with the neo-Purist architectural language of Eisenman’s cardboard architecture. Th en I talk about

the Grays and the Whites: “the implicit interlocutor in the debate was Robert Venturi.” For whom CASE and the IAUS were “too European.” He’d been invited but had said no.

Ironically, the most critical attack on the IAUS’ independence was formulated by a European fi gure who exerted considerable fascination with the Institute, the Italian Marxist critic Manfredo Tafuri. In his 1978 essay ‘Th e Ashes of Jeff erson,’ Tafuri bemoaned the IAUS’ turn away from urban projects, and its specialization into a “boudoir” removed from political realities. Th e project of disciplinary autonomy was, for Tafuri a symptom of “the organizational structure of intellectual work in America,” which led Institute thinkers into an “exaltation of its own apartness,” and its architects into a “bureaucratic formalization of metropolitan life.” (Remember this is an Italian dictionary.) Most critiques have followed this Venturian-Tafurian model, of thinking that what was wrong with the Institute was that it was too American or too European. Most have also recalled the Bürgerian critique of the neo-avant-garde: that it rehashes the work of the original avant garde, but does so in an institutional context that avoids its political power. I would like to argue that in our obsession with European models, with the question of transfers, lateness and decontextualization, with the connection to MoMA and cardboard architecture of Eisenman we have forgotten to make one important connection, which is this: theory is not just what happened to American architecture aft er 1968, it’s also

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what happened to American politics aft er 1968.

Th e proliferation of think tanks, public policy centers and research groups marked a shift towards greater emphasis on ideas and agenda-setting in Washington. Th e capital became a site for a “competition of ideas,” where a few people set agendas and the rest was an elaborate political scene. Th is was in part based on the post-’68 change from immediate reform towards the development of long-term theoretical models. A new intellectual class developed into myriad think tanks, trying to overcome the empiricism of the so-called action intellectuals. Here I cite Irving Kristol’s famous text “Th e Troublesome Intellectuals,” published in ’66:

It is quite clear that the intellectuals are in

American politics to stay. Indeed, those government departments that have not intellectualized themselves are fi nding their political power dwindling. American politics has an ingrained Philistinism and anti-intellectualism. We need the best ideas of the best minds to make our cities inhabitable, our schools educational, our economy workable. At the same time, our best minds need to be chastened by some fi rst-hand experience.

It’s this same rhetoric, basically, that the Institute used to argue that architecture should be theoretical. In fact, Eisenman himself wrote about this in 1977. He said, “What the Institute should become is a unique cultural institution. Th e model for an institution should be an architectural version of a policy group such as the Brookings Institute in Washington, and

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a think tank such as the Institute for Advanced Studies.”

Th ere’s no reason we can’t speak of the Institute in these political terms. Certainly they aff ord us a new view of the journal Oppositions. Th e journal that nobody reads is a staple of political think tanks: it’s written by a few of the thinkers, fi lled with diffi cult theoretical jargon between sober covers and attached to a defi nitely happening scene. Recently, Oppositions was part of the “Little Magazines” exhibition, but I think the obscurity of its language makes it more akin to these [political journals] than the architectural ones.

We also can get a better view of the closing of the Institute. I’ll read the portion of the dictionary entry that deals with its closing. It comes aft er Tafuri. “Tafuri’s critique haunted the last days of the Institute, as balancing its commitment to the intellectual refl ection and its openness to capitalistic patronage became increasingly diffi cult. In 1982, the IAUS planned two events that reveal this polarization: a symposium called ‘Architecture, Criticism, Ideology,’ organized by Joan Ockman to salvage the IAUS’ intellectual mission from Tafuri’s damning critique; and a conference called ‘Architecture and Development: Th e New Investment Patterns,’ organized by a fundraising committee put together to raise the funds from corporate architecture fi rms as required by the NEH grant they received in 1978.”

Th e history of the Institute is portrayed as a decline of public funds and a rise in private funds, but in fact the NEH grant required that the Institute

raise the matching funds from corporate donors. In some sense, it was the NEH who required that the Institute, in its late days, be frequented by a successful class of corporate architects. If you want to really fi nd out why the Institute closed, you should fi nd out why the NEH wanted its Institutes to be both private and public institutions.

I’ll do this last part very quickly the get to the diagrams, which are kind of cool. I’ll show a set of diagrams and gloss over the argument I’ll be making about them. Th ese were made in 1973 in a grant proposal, for a “Program in Generative Design,” which is described as “preparation of theoretical studies for the application of structuralism to architecture and urban planning.” My overall argument about the early days of the Institute is that these grant writing exercises were serious theoretical endeavors where Eisenman, Frampton and Gandelsonas worked out tentative positions that were later posited as authoritative programs with much stronger polemical force in the pages of Oppositions. Th e form of the social-scientifi c grant proposal was crucial in distilling clarity in both the theories and the authorial voice of the theoritician.

Consider, for instance, these two consecutive versions of Eisenman’s opening statement to describe a research program:

First, I am an architect, not a theorist or historian. I believe in the inseparability of ideas and form.

Next draft :

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First, as an architect and theorist, I believe in the inseparability of ideas and form.

So “historian” is gone, but in the simple transformation of two sentences into one we have the inaugural defi nition of an architectural theorist: someone who believes in the inseparability of ideas and form. I’m pairing these two images to show that this grant was written to serve two purposes. First to introduce structuralism in architecture, and second, to convince the National Institute of Mental Health that there is an inseparability between ideas and form. In other words, structuralism and formalism are actually two diff erent agendas that are to come together in the diagrams.

(I’m skipping over this part of the argument involves showing how the Institute took three-part diagrams, like this Chomskian linguistic diagram, and made them into two part diagrams in order to create a structuralist-like binomial. Th en, having created a binomial, a third element (what Eisenman calls “form” and Gandelsonas calls “theory”) is proposed as mediation. In this manner, form and theory appeared to arise naturally as a middle term between structuralist binomials.)

Th ere are two kinds of diagrams in the Generative Design proposal. Th e fi rst looks like this, an organizational chart. Th e second invokes a kind of hollowed-out subjectivity through profi les of human beings. Th e fi rst appears in the early grant proposal; the second aft er feedback is received, from the Institute of Mental Health, identifying “four areas of

weakness”: Th ey got the money for a year, but

got feedback that they were weak in these areas:

1. Overreliance on linguistic terminology2. No explicit methodology3. No model which was directly related to architecture4. A lack of defi nition of data.

So the National Institute of Mental Health is telling the IAUS they don’t know what they’re doing. How did they respond to these criticisms? With fi ve diagrams intended to make clear a methodology. First, functionalism is represented as a model where form mediates between function (a door) and subject (a head). Th en a diagram shows the weakness in that model, using the idea of scale to show that function (the door) is actually relative to form (the cube) and that forms are relative to each other: big door, versus little door. Th e third diagram locates this is time: because you’ve seen big doors and small doors before, the subject has internalized, perhaps idealized, these categories. Th e fourth diagram then introduces the category of form, which acts as a kind of storage database for the memories of big and small doors. Th e last image gives the subject an interlocutor, and presents form as a kind of shared code. Form has been successfully externalized.

What kind of diagrams are these? First, they’re a response to [Charles] Jencks’ diagrams of a similar process which also feature a profi led human head. In some ways they accuse Jencks of

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not understanding the analogy between architecture and language. But they’re not formalist diagrams like the Gestalt diagram of two faces in/and a vase, where form and subject are confl ated. Here the continuity between form and the spaces outside of it is represented in the oscillation between fi gure and ground. In contrast, in Generative Design, form is clearly external to the subject. Th ey’re also not structuralist diagrams, like the Saussurian model of language, where form is a relational component of language. Form, again, is externalized. Finally—and I only thought of this because of the doors—it’s not the Lacanian diagram of two bathroom doors, that [ Jacques] Lacan proposed to replace the Saussure’s diagram or a tree, of which he wrote, “there may be forms which enter into the symbiotic model unproblematically, but they ultimately pass through a constructed subjectivity.” Here, for instance, male and female. I don’t really have an answer for what kind of diagram this is, but my working hypothesis is that they make a socio-scientifi c argument for formalism through a structuralist category. Th is is why the grant was not renewed.

To conclude, I’d like to make a quick suggestion that these diagrams for Generative Design and that of the institutional model for the IAUS make the same gesture: they construct a binomial, and let something arise out of it. In the former, it’s “form” or “theory.” In the latter it’s cultural autonomy. Th ere’s also an uncanny similarity of these two diagrams with the Harlem Plan of 1968. It follows the same structure: two elements bridged by a third as a connection to a fourth,

overarching context or patron. It’s not at all unlikely that given diff erent historical forces, the Harlem Plan should have become a reality. You’d have to change a few things: you’d have to replace the Bryn Mawr, Oberlin, Cornell and Princeton students with some from Harlem. And you would arrive at a diff erent kind of theoretical practice in the center, one which is based on the modalities of architectural practice. Instead of form (as in Generative Design) you would have “plan/program/et cetera,” as in the Harlem Plan.

So to conclude, I’d like to say that this model is not very diff erent, if you think about it, from the modes of theoretical practice that contemporary architectural discourse is calling “research” today.

My conclusion cuts two ways: fi rst, we can’t fall into the trap of rejecting theory simply because we don’t like the image that theory has acquired in retrospect. Th is (the middle of the diagram) is still the space that we’re occupying today. Second, we have to get better at choosing our reality eff ects. Th e Harlem Plan didn’t happen, but it still contains as much historical truth about the history of architectural theory as “any concept of that history.” We are ,in other words, justifi ed in making the judgment that this was either a really good idea, or a really bad one. But we have to be interested enough in what “really happened” to fi nd out that it even existed at all.

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Architecture as Corporate Ontology; or, The Topology of the System of Objects

John Harwood

It’s particularly exciting to be the sole representative of the liberal arts college here. I left my cornfield in the able hands of my students to come to the big city. It’s been a lot of fun. To frame how this fits into a larger project—an unfinished, ongoing work—I have, for this talk, two epigraphs that I’ll allow you to read for yourselves, and another that we’ll get to in a second. They’re there to indicate that what I’m going to present today is really part of a series of overlaps that motivated my dissertation and now the book that I’m working on. I’m only going to look at two of the three elements that are explored in the book. They are the computer, the architect and the corporation. Today I’m going to focus exclusively first on the corporation, and then ask some questions about how the corporation comes to overlap with the architect. I do want to emphasize this third epigraph.

The recognition that industry has come to be dominated by these economic autocrats must bring with it a realization of the hollowness of the familiar statement that economic enterprise in America is a matter of individual initiative. To the dozen or so men in control, there is room for such initiative. For the tens and even hundreds of thousands of workers and of owners in a single enterprise, individual initiative no longer exists. Their activity is group activity on a scale so large that the individual, except he be in a position of control, has dropped into relative insignificance.

In 1968, in a preface to the reissue of his classic study, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, coauthored with economist

Gardiner Means in 1932, the legal scholar Adolf Berle re-theorized the “changing content of property.” The concepts of property inherent to common law had deteriorated in the face of a new regime of ownership characterized by what he termed managerial control. I’ll quote from this preface:

The rapid increase in technical development necessarily downgrades the position of physical or tangible things and upgrades the factors of organization and technical knowledge. Organization is not reducible to formula. Technical knowledge is rarely, if ever, assignable to any individual, group of individuals or corporation. It is part of the heritage of the country and of the race. In neither case do the traditional formulae applicable to common law party fit the current fact.

The utter destruction of the traditional concept of property in the wake of what is commonly called today the management revolution was accomplished through a radical division of labor. The rise of management assigned control over the workings of the corporation decisively separated ownership (exercised through financial instruments such as securities and futures contracts) from control, and moreover dispersed control and ownership alike through the articulation of differentiated degrees and modes of property.

Here is the other epigraph: a very famous type of image, from a famous book on management called The Visible Hand. It has become a commonplace to assert that the response within architectural history

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and theory to such facts has been wholly inadequate. We’ve become increasingly aware of the shortcomings of our shorthand. Architects names are our shorthand for a firm; or, as in the case of SOM, architectural historians anachronistically restore the name Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to the firm in a perverse form of longhand; the statements of Presidents and CEOs are shorthand for the desires of a vast productive enterprise; single machines or products shorthand for complex apparatus; and so on, and so forth. However, we still await a theory adequate to the description of architecture and its related disciplines within this new regime of property. I don’t think this means that we haven’t made some great steps, some progress in this regard, and I think that the fruits of serious engagement with these problems are already visible on the branches of a growing tree of historical and theoretical work. One thinks immediately of the pioneering work of John Summerson and Reyner Banham, the critical essays of [Guilio Carlo] Argan and [Manfredo] Tafuri, and the network-driven methods of historians and theorists such as Mark Wigley and Reinhold Martin, and not to short any of us here, those of us in the room today. There are certainly many more works—from sociologists, economic and business historians, media theorists, and so on—that might form something of an archive of approaches to the problem of narrating or describing the diffuse subjectivities that inhabit and inherit the advanced capitalist world.

My efforts in this direction are centered on the insistence that architectural historians must engage directly with the character (I

use this term advisedly) of the objecthood of the corporation. One cannot do this anthropologically, peering through the fronds of the potted palm from the corner of the secretarial pool or the boardroom—as William H. Whyte did so famously in The Organization Man—since one is precisely not dealing with a logic that places humanity at its center. Nor can one approach this problem solely from the vantage point of technics—as did a famous figure such as Thomas Watson, Sr. in theorizing his own corporation, or Lewis Mumford—since this would lead us inevitably to describe corporate architecture and corporations themselves only as perfect realizations of a schema (i.e. technocracy) when it is anything but such a perfection. Rather, I would like to lay out the beginnings of an argument for considering the ontology of the corporation and its material reference, drawing from the key concept of Berle and Means’ study.

That key concept, which only appears in the margins of the text, is the term control. This term is in frequent use amongst critical theorists, of course, and is one familiar to all of us. However, we also understand that it is all too often used as a loose metaphor for the internalization of discipline at a universal level (e.g. the schematic theory of control as a state of being laid out in Deleuze’s influential, unfulfilled and paradoxical prolegomena Postscript on the Societies of Control). In describing the changing nature of corporate endeavor, Berle and Means point to a crucial component of control, and this is the specific emplacement of subjects and objects. In law and economics, control is always already a

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matter of position. Noting this, it would be best to approach a descriptive theory of the corporation topologically, that is to privilege the logic of placement or logistics of property, in the state of shifting and radical dispersal that we find it; to look past the images produced by the corporation to the organizational principles that position images into a configuration that might be properly called a corporation as such.

Bouncing between the image of the corporation as a good thing or a bad thing frustrates our effort to understand the corporate body. In a sense, we’re stuck in a de-ontological position rather than an ontological one. Just as necessary as a revision of the topology of the system of objects that forms the corporation, however, is the revision of the notion of architectural agency within that system. One might argue whether or not architecture can be situated inside of this system.

This image is from a wonderful ‘70s management manual, and we’ll keep that up there for a second as I dive into something a little ugly. I think we’ve heard already quite loudly from contemporary critics the notion that the architect (or the industrial designer or graphic designer) is but another object within this system, but I think this is only true up to a point. This talk will be an attempt to situate that point. So let’s start on the ontology.

The first step might be to define the corporation. I think this is, unfortunately, easier said than done. When it comes to ontology, to language, to jurisprudence and even to its fundamental field of operations—what we call, in another form of shorthand, the economy—the multinational corporation

is a fundamentally unstable and slippery entity. Perhaps the best demonstration of this is a thought experiment devised by the economic historian and theorist Andrew Hacker in the introduction to a collection of essays that struggle to define the multinational corporation at the moment of its self-evident dominance of Western culture in the mid-1960s. Many of you have probably looked at this book; it’s called The Corporation Takeover. Although it’s a bit long, I think this thought experiment is worth quoting nearly in full for the remarkable clarity with which it poses the fundamental problems confronting those of us who would seek to define the corporation. So here’s the quote:

By 1972, American Electric [a fictional company] had completed its last stages of automation. Employees were no longer necessary. Raw materials, left on the loading platform, were automatically transferred from machine to machine and the finished products were deposited at the other end of the factory ready for shipment. AE’s purchasing, marketing and general management functions could be handled by ten directors, with the occasional help of outside consultants and contractors. Beginning in 1962, AE’s employee pension fund had started investing its capital in AE stock. Gradually it bought more and more of the company’s shares on the open market, and by 1968 it was the sole owner of AE. As employees became eligible for retirement—some of them prematurely due to the introduction of automation—the fund naturally liquidated its capital to provide pensions. But instead of reselling its AE shares on the open market, the fund sold the stock

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to AE itself, which provided the funds for pensions out of current income. By 1981 the last AE employee had died and the pension fund was dissolved. At this time too, AE became the sole owner of its shares. It had floated no new issues, preferring to engage in self-financing through earnings.

AE, the story continues, decided to lobby Congress for the passage of a bill that would limit the importation of foreign electric generators. The bill passes as the story goes, but a group of Senators are disturbed by AE’s lobbying practices, and they decide to hold an investigation. I’ll now return to Hacker’s thought experiment. There is a member of the corporate board of directors and a Senator. Just to separate them, the Senator will have a slightly gruffer voice. We begin with the director:

[…] and if we undertook these educational and political activities, it was our view that they were dictated by the company’s best interests. Senator: When you say these campaigns were on behalf of the company’s interests, I’m not clear what you mean. Were you acting for your stockholders here?

Director: I’m afraid, Senator, that I cannot say that we were. You see, American Electric has no stockholders. The company owns all its stock itself. We bought up the last of it several years ago.

Senator: Well if not stockholders, then were you acting as spokesman for American Electric’s employees, whose jobs might be in danger if foreign competition got too severe?

Director: No, sir. I cannot say that either. American Electric is a fully automated company and we have no employees.

Senator: Are you saying that this company of yours is really no more than a gigantic machine? A machine that needs no operators and appears to own itself?

Director: I suppose that’s one way of putting it. I’ve never thought much about it.

Senator: Then so far as I can see, all of this political pressure that you’ve applied was really in the interest of yourself and your nine fellow directors.

Director: I’m afraid, Senator, that there I must disagree with you. The ten of us pay ourselves annual salaries of one hundred thousand dollars a year; year in, year out, and none of us receives any bonuses or raises. All earnings are applied back into the company. We feel very strongly about this. In fact we look on ourselves as a kind of civil servant.

Senator: And by the company, you don’t mean stockholders or employees because you don’t have any, and you don’t mean the ten directors because you just seem to be salaried managers which the machine hires to run its affairs. In fact, when this machine gets into politics or any kind of activity, it has interests of its own which can be quite different from the personal interests of its managers. I’m afraid I find this all rather confusing.

Director: It may be confusing to you, Senator, but I may say it had been quite straightforward to us here at American Electric. We’re just

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doing the job for which we were hired; to look out for the company’s interests.

Okay. End quote, and end of this silly performance. The example that Hacker works up here—both Hacker and I admit freely—is quite extreme. However, I think it clearly demonstrates that the identity of the post-World War II (i.e. managerial or modern) corporation is not reducible to its employees, to its products, to its productive apparatus, or even its punitive directors. As a result of such an analysis, one is left with nothing more to hold onto than the frequently repeated phrase in the story, company’s interests.

The identity of the corporation is thus diffuse. It is a relation rather than an object or a collection of objects, an imperative statement rather than a definition. The plurality of corporate interests indicates that the corporation is both a specific form of capital—we should recall Marx’s description that capital, of course, is not a thing—but also a desire to perpetuate itself through an autonomous and self-reflexive production and reproduction of discourse. In ideological terms, one might say the corporation thus takes on a different aspect to each subject that it interpolates. It appears differently to an owner or stockholder of a corporation than it does to an employee, a customer, and to other public or private organizations. Therefore, the abstract status of the corporation as a discursive machine indicates that it is immaterial. It is therefore quite simply incorrect to treat a corporation as an architectural or design client or patron like any other; yet a corporation, nonetheless requires a material apparatus—in AE’s

case, automated machinery and a board of directors—in order to function. Function will be the key term for us. The material manifestations of the corporation are what allow it to interpolate and interact with other organizations and individuals. It could not communicate its interests to the US Senate without its director any more than it could produce generators without a factory. Without a design, without a rational and material grounding in the world through which it can operate, the corporation would literally cease to be. It would simply disappear: a dissipation of capital, a false statement.

In the corporate context, then, design must serve as a medium—a phenomenon of appearance, as Derrida and many others have pointed out, that has an uncanny status, moving between spaces and times and belonging wholly to neither. A design is a pattern, an ordering or a plan for ordering. To design is thus to give order to aim to order. The term arises, of course, from the Latin designare, to name, and retains to the present this sense of classification. In a very real sense, to design is to posit a taxonomy, to arrange the world into a closed and ordered system. But a design is also an end. A design is simultaneously that which is made in preparation for the coming of an object, necessarily preceding that object, and an end in itself. The uncanny temporality of the term is captured with perfect ghoulishness, I think, in Shakespeare’s line from MacBeth, “where whithered murther towards his design moves like a ghost.”

There is, though, an additional paradox that appears, and appearances are going to become increasingly important in

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Hacker’s thought experiment. His Senator asks incredulously whether or not the corporation can be a machine that needs no operators and appears to own itself. This raises again the question of the ideology of the corporation. By that, of course, I mean its logic of appearance. The fact is self-evident whether one considers the fictional American Electric or the very real (IBM, GE, Raytheon, etc.), the corporation is an entity that quite unlike the individual human being—who must rely on rights other than property rights such as the right to self-determination or so-called free will—can treat itself as its own property. This apparent paradox is, of course, a fiction of classical and neo-classical economics.

A good way to parse this apparent paradox is via an examination of money. Philosophers of economics and social researchers have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that money is not—as classical and neo-classical economists would have it—a simple medium of exchange. Rather, it is what some have termed money of account, a measure of value and valuableness inscribed, issued, secured, reabsorbed and constituted by the state purely independent of its physical form. Money is the potential to own rather than the owned object. This demonstrates for us the key category error of considering the corporation solely as either an individual entity or as accrued or accumulated capital. Money can no more own money than a social relation can be said to own something. What is owned by and through the corporation is only ever a concrete set of objects. Much like money, the corporation only owns itself (i.e., is the proprietor and guarantor of its

own value) insofar as the state guarantees, condones and even wills its right to value.

The fiction of a truly transnational corporation and the concomitant heady visions of moneyless economy, rather from the eschatological left or the neo-liberal right, are as groundless as the very idea of a groundless money. Instead, the corporation is the fiction of self-ownership and self-determination chartered and endorsed by the state. The multinational or transnational is a coordination of these charters and endorsements built up out of state sanctions rather than negating them. As a case in point, we might look to Charles Eames’ well-known diagram of his own practice, The Office of Charles and Ray Eames, in which we see the state, nearly erased, attached to his most prized client, IBM.

Now I want to shift a little bit away from an effort to describe the character of the corporation to the efforts made by designers to do this work, because I think it gives us another type of insight.

Given that the language of corporate economics is so often out of step with the ontology of the corporation, it may be surprising to learn that designers themselves grasped this high level of abstraction early in the management revolution. Indeed, they did so even before most of them became involved with the designing of so-called corporate character. One might assume, therefore, that an easier purchase might be earned on the situation of corporate design by admitting the nebulousness of corporate ontology and instead turning to the stable, unified identity of the industrial designer. Despite the fact that much of the history of industrial design is written from a

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biographical perspective, with some notable exceptions, such an approach unfortunately gets us not much further.

Since I’m instead dealing with the overlap between corporation and designer, I’m going to make recourse again to an excellent and, I think, really powerful, thought experiment to make my point, this one by the first industrial designer to theorize the industrial designer rather than industrial design, Harold Van Doren, the author of the treatise, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide of 1940. After some insightful and quite self-critical remarks—it’s a surprising book, and worth revisiting—on the nature of the still-nascent discipline, van Doren turns the third chapter in to attempting to define the most crucial aspect of his treatise, the designer’s place in industry.

Despite the rather definitive-sounding title, the chapter begins with a litany of questions. If, as Van Doren had already argued, design is of critical importance to industry, then “just where does the designer fit into that scheme and what is his relevant importance? What should be his precise relationship to the various departments of the business he is serving, and how will he fit within the existing framework of industry?” The answers, Van Doren admits, are uncertain, and “it may be a matter of years before the designer will find his proper level in the kingdom of commerce.”

Instead of grappling with the whole panoply of existing arrangements between industrial designers and corporations, he, like Hacker twenty-five years later, turns instead to defining a search for “just where the designer fits” by composing a business

fable. In this fable, the fictional business, literally named Empirical Manufacturing Company, faces losing market share because its sturdy and very reliable machines are more massive and ugly than those of its competitors then entering the market. Van Doren describes the structure of the company in strikingly coherent and incisive terms.

The quasi-military structure of the Empirical organization is much like that of any other American company of its size and reputation. Each officer is responsible to his superior and eventually to the commander in chief. The board of directors holds the purse strings, but has faith in the company president, a vigorous executive in middle age. Although the board may dictate fiscal policies, it leaves details of management, disposition of operating funds and general merchandising policies up to him.

This him, however, is no unitary subject, but rather a diagrammatic set of relations. Below the president, two vice presidents manage the two main arms of the company, roughly divided into a production branch and a sales branch and Van Doren illustrates the management system of Empirical with a diagram. Nowhere in the diagram, he points out, has any provision been made for design. As Empirical’s sales continue to tank, the company’s managers fumble for a solution, and eventually the vice president for sales is charged with hiring an industrial designer to help the company out of its funk. Van Doren then revises the organizational diagram of Empirical to illustrate the changed situation. Surprisingly, however, the industrial designer is nowhere to be seen, only his “sphere of influence,”

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registered only by a grading to demonstrate the relative intimacy that the industrial designer has with the working of a given department, gives any evidence of the designer’s presence.

The implication is that the designer and the corporation are entities of wholly different orders. He (and at this point they were nearly all male) overlaps with areas of corporation rather than becoming part of it. Moreover, the designer’s value to the corporation lies precisely in his ability to be smoothly integrated into the managerial structure. The immanence of the designer to the corporation—his simultaneous and diffuse impact on each area of that structure—constitutes an irreducible difference between himself, corporation and product. I think that last distinction is important, although I won’t be talking about

it today. Van Doren then outlines many of the ethical imperatives that structure this situation—the designer’s need to keep his relationship to the client wholly confidential, for instance, so as not to interfere unfairly in capitalistic competition, his need to work on the design in the earliest stages of development to justify his presence and influence at each subsequent stage, and his need to preside over the difficult gray area of planned obsolescence insuring that products replace one another rapidly, but not too rapidly. Here is Van Doren’s summing up of the role of the industrial designer:

At his best, the designer is an animator, a builder of enthusiasm in others. He knows how to work with others, meeting executives on equal footing, and still gaining the confidence of the man on the bench. He brings to his

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client a broader design point of view than a man can have when burdened with the responsibilities of everyday operation. He fully acknowledges the superior technical knowledge of the men in the client’s organization. He cannot and does not presume, of course, to tell them how to do things which they have learned from years of research and expertise, but through his very contact, he may contribute a helpful knowledge of materials and methods gained in the plants of other clients.

Pithily, because Van Doren is a good writer, he quickly reduces this at the end of the chapter to an aphorism, “Industrial designers who take their work seriously cannot afford to play the prima donna.” Although he never offered such a cogent and systematic theory of the relationship, the leading corporate design consultant to the American multinational from the 1950s to the 1970s, the architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes, still had a gift for articulating that relationship, and he frequently echoed Van Doren’s ideas in precise terms. Following Noyes by being himself diffuse, the designer held up a mirror to the corporation, allowing it to view itself as a coherent entity.

Design often illuminates the nature of the company to itself and stimulates fresh internal courses of action. The processes of sound industrial design touch the phases of product planning, ergonomics, engineering, economics, manufacturing, aesthetics and marketing, and so must be an integral part of the company’s product development processes. For such a role, the design consultant must be some combination of designer, philosopher,

historian, educator, lecturer and businessman.To those unfamiliar with the unusual self-image of the corporate design consultant, I think this description may smack a bit of pride. However, Noyes and his fellow industrial designers, humble in most all cases, saw it quite the other way around. The idea was to serve as a medium to the corporation, a way of rendering it material, providing it with a character that could pervade the entire organization. I think we see here the designer taking on a role that is similar to the popular understanding of money, the ability to serve as a medium that makes exchange possible. This is all fine and well, but I think we still have a remaining question. What was this unified subject that Noyes sought to articulate in order to cure his patient, the corporation, of its fragmented self-image? His first true corporate client, IBM, was not simply a maker of business machines, Noyes reasoned in an interview in 1966, rather it was in the business of controlling, organizing and redistributing information in space. This, Noyes recognized, is a matter of what he called environmental control. He said, “If you get to the very heart of the matter, what IBM really does is to help man extend his control over his environment. I think that’s the meaning of the company.” This definition of IBM’s identity serves notice that the critique of function must be the commonplace separation of function from form. Rather, it must be conducted to develop a concept that governs the separation of control from ownership, from form, from position. As Jean Baudrillard hypothesizes in his landmark critique of postindustrial society, it is a matter not

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of objects, but of a system of objects. The system skews means-ends rationality even as it is produced by it. Here I’ll quote from The System of Objects. “Functional in no way qualifies what is adapted to a goal, merely what is adapted to an order or system. Functionality is the ability to become integrated into an overall scheme. An object’s functionality is the very thing that enables it to transcend its main function in the direction of a secondary one; to play a part, to become a combining element, an adjustable item within a universal system of signs.”

To take an example of the articulation of corporate function by way of conclusion, we may look at how the system is rendered by designers. The logo, considered first and foremost by the designer as a derative technique, not a representational one—and this distinction is an important one—serves the function of rendering the utensil (i.e., the useful thing) into the object, a thing set into relations with other things in order to define the corporate subject. The logo is thus affixed to the entirety of the collection of objects within the corporation through the logic of communication. The products, rendered object, in turn lend the subject a material and functional existence. As Noyes put it when speaking of the need for these objectified products and utensils to find a home within a coherent space called architecture, “A typewriter sits in a room in a building. There must be a sense of their relationship in each of these.” The spatial deployment of these objects is complex, and a careful description would take me all day, and well beyond the time allotted here. We can readily see in Noyes’ plans and diagrams

and staged photographs and design models, I think, a careful repetition of a spatial trope of cloistering these subsystems of objects.

Further, these architectural systems—and this gets back to the question of the transnationality of the corporation—are integrated into yet another regime of organization through the tele-technological capacity of their contents, stitching together different corporate emplacements into a broader network that transcends geographical and political boundaries even as it’s defined by them. It is this system, with its irreducibly complex goings on managed from a central hub, that we identify when we use the term multinational corporation. In this talk, I think I moved upward and outward in scale sketching out the system of objects, but we might just as easily move in the opposite direction, identifying the control function of the designer at each mediatic stage. The aim of my remarks today is quite simply to point out that this systematicity is not a static totality, which would, after all, be to describe the corporation as an object. It is plainly not that. Rather it’s a web of relationships reliant on this key functional separation between ownership and control. Within this web it becomes possible for the architect to assert, as Charles Eames did in his work for IBM, that “everything is architecture.”

HARWOOD

Panel Discussion: Description

Timothy Hyde, Moderator

Timothy Hyde (TH): Let me start by repeating what John [McMorrough] said at the very beginning in his remarks that he’s brought us here to give individual presentations, but not so much to hear the specifics of those presentations as to try to elicit some strands and commonalities and differences of opinion among those different strands. What that means, unfortunately I think, is that I have to propose that we treat your papers as a kind of reality effect to talk about something else.

The initial way I propose we could do that is that the papers were all positing a very specific type of description that I think of as an indirect description. My shorthand for that—not knowing anything about quantum mechanics—would be, as I understand it, the description of something like the Higgs boson or any of the other subatomic particles which is never a description of the thing but always of the effects of the thing, the residue that is left after the event that shows a subatomic particle actually existed in that place. I think that’s actually very similar to the kinds of operations and events that you’re talking about.

To be specific, my example from Lucia’s paper is the initial diagram of the Urban League in which architecture is et cetera, architecture is something that will only become visible through its interactions with known processes and events. Similarly, in the diagram from van Doren, the map of the corporation, the architect or designer is only visible as the gray field, and therefore only known through the map of the corporation as an effect or residue that occurs in the corporation itself. Maybe stretching it a little further in John’s case, but I think you’re still

thinking about architecture as something, an effect or consequence of the known, the reality of the apocalypse. It becomes visible in a certain way only as the effect of it. In each case there’s an indirection, not dealing with architecture as such but through its appearance, its format or its association or its relevance to known narratives.

The question I’d like to pose as a way of kicking things off is that all of those are practices of description that have a high degree of dependency on being able to articulate the concrete thing that is making architecture visible: the corporation, the format of social science, the narrative. All of those seem to be things that have their own way of being described, their own format in a sense. I’m wondering how much of the practice of description here is actually a sort of appropriation of a mode of description that’s already occurring elsewhere, is already built in elsewhere, and how much is a wrestling with the conjuncture of the two?

John McMorrough (JM): I’ll start, simply because I was really struck with the three presentations. I think it’s really difficult to achieve unity out of these three, and in my own case, I have an increasing awareness of the precarious nature of what I’m trying to work on as a contemporary topic. So I think both of your presentations helped me to realize that as a contemporary topic, I’m trying to write a narrative through previous narratives in a way that doesn’t devalue that work, but sets it in a particular context with me.

I especially appreciated Lucia’s presentation of the secret history of the Institute, and it makes me realize that what I

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was trying to do was work through a series of mythic constructions. In the end I still feel that the nature of those constructions—your presentation shows their contingency—I still feel there’s a certain amount of inevitability operating through these myths or constructs as they deploy in the field. In the world I’m trying to operate in it’s a question of constructing new myths from old myths. One as just an appreciation of that work, and two it makes me wonder how to position these in terms of audience and the effect of that. I’m taking Timothy’s question and repositioning it as another question. What is that field of operation?

In Lucia’s case, it was really like a corrective to a certain conception that we’ve built up through both the practitioners and those who follow. In my work I’m trying to take what had been built upon and show its seams. Not to displace the origin, but to see how it perpetuated over time. You’re really offering a corrective to those assumptions. In your positioning as an architectural historian but also an historian of culture it responds to a couple of different audiences. For me, the question is who the audience for those revelations were in your work, and how that perpetuates.

Lucia Allais (LA): Any more tough questions? I’m working against a very large project that’s happening right now to tell the history of the Institute, and I’m not going to be the person telling it. That narrative relies on the agency of the actors who were in it; it’s less about format. It also relies a lot more on the myths and explicating the myths. In a way I think the people who are taking the Institute as a prehistory of the present really

do a lot of interesting work about what those myths have become. For me, not talking about that is also just trying to let people work on whatever they’re working on.

The idea that correcting the myth at the base gives you insight into the idea of effects and myths is what’s interesting to me. Culture is an effect, culture is the space that’s opened up for myths, and the opportunism for that is what I’m looking for in my work elsewhere. That applies for UNESCO and it applies for the Institute. Also, in terms of the opportunity for me to identify this as an interesting project that looks so similar—it’s really uncanny if you read the proposals—it sounds like conference after conference about what research should sound like. Word for word almost. For me, even taking out that piece of paper—which nobody else is going to take out because it just doesn’t fit particularly well—that’s a contribution to architecture. You can tell me what else you want and I’ll find that.

JM: It’s all sort of there. It’s a Rorschach.

LA: My point is that when you go into the archive, there’s something you have to do to the archive. This is Rankian objective history. Right now, if you wanted a more polemical point towards architecture, it’s the way we just use theory to mean that we can’t do history because it would pop the theory bubble or something. That’s what I’m writing against. It’s okay to talk about the history of theory, it’s not going to make theory go away, and the idea that we can’t talk about what really happened is sort of screwy. In terms of interdisciplinarity, this project is

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a lot more interesting to the historian who has an office next to mine than anything else that the Institute ever did. They do not care about the Whites and the Grays. He doesn’t even care that it’s not important to the history of the Institute. To be able to have that discussion for me is super interesting. In a way, that reveals my intentions. The public policy stuff is a small contribution to the history of architecture, but in a way more a gesture towards opening up the field so that it can talk to other people. By it I mean I. I suppose that doesn’t really answer the question, but I talked for five minutes.

John Harwood (JH): Your due diligence, right? Is it my turn? In response to this question of trace effects and causality for what its worth in narrating these things, on the one hand, I’m amused and interested in this quantum mechanical approach, because it can offer a certain kind of distance. I could say, “there’s a very high probability that I’m actually here right now.” You can actually take a step back and say this is one such effect and therefore one such cause for what we see in architecture. Rather than simply reading architecture in a paranoid way as though it were some sort of inscription that can be decoded if you simply bring the right secret decoder ring along. I like that analogy.

I would also respond by saying that I think Lucia raises an important issue, about the enduring legacy of historicism, its bifurcated nature, and the difficulty of deciding whether one is going to be uncovering patterns and laws, therefore making an appeal to a discourse that is itself historicist like economics, or do this nitty gritty stuff and make history out of that as an

archaeological enterprise—not, of course, in the Foucaultian sense. I’m at a bit of a loss except to say that I’ve tried to avoid coming up with a monolithic reading of the corporation as a means for explaining—which would be to explain away—architecture as it has come to be, to defer de-ontological questions for a moment to try to figure out what’s going on. I think I would end up on Ranke’s side rather than the other side with Burkhardt. I don’t know whether he’s the right name for that side.

LA: We could rename it what’s really going on.

JH: I suppose we could go back to de Tocqueville or something. Peering through the palm frawns with a pith helmet on to discover the grand laws of history.

LA: Cultural history versus objective history is basically the predicament that they’re talking about the sixteenth century Popes. So their choice is whether you tell the history of six Popes in a row or one Pope—in Burkhardt’s case, one civilization no matter the Popes, but all the art that looks the same. In our case, this has the potential of becoming a lot more powerful because there are a lot of architects who are still working with those myths. That’s the point of saying what I said. If I say the Whites versus the Grays does not matter, it’s going to take a lot of work to convince a lot of people who think that it really matters. Even in John’s presentation, as a shorthand, those two things are more real than anything that you showed, even though we worked really hard to show that the piece of paper

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that says Harlem Plan is a lot more real by the standards of objectivist history than the Whites and the Grays debates.

Those houses matter, but in terms of telling the history of the institution as an institution, which is my project, the piece of paper was a lot more determined and embedded in the history and so forth. I do think that there’s the problem of recent history, and I was trying to say that maybe this helps. I could have talked about Foucault versus whomever, of Badiou versus whoever the opposite of Badiou is, maybe Latour versus Badiou, but those things are not being usefully deployed in architectural discourse today to undo those myths.

TH: A further parsing might be the

interrelationship of format and agency. You just separated them out to rebuff me—I know you didn’t mean to do that—but the interrelationship between those two things is another way you can distinguish beween the Rankian and the Burkhardtian. They would both be interested in that relationship, but placing a different value on either side of the binary.

In the papers and in the discussion I’m hearing more, and thinking more about to what degree is format being posited here as a precondition, a preconditioning of agency? We’ve talked about architecture for a long time as a free will, as volitional, then we swung the other way and talked about its determinism. You’re opening up the possibility of a more nuanced rendering

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of the relationship of format and agency in each of these presentations. They’re not the same, and I think that’s the nuance that is potentially valuable.

LA: I think when Eisenman decides to let go of CASE, which is like CIAM, and start the Institute, he’s struggling with that. What is architectural agency? He makes the executive decision and that’s how he’s going to do it.

TH: It’s really all right there in his quote. “As an architect and theorist.” He’s working to adapt to an existing grant structure that already exists.

LA: I’m also talking about very specific people. I wanted to ask John [Harwood] if you’ve thought about design as intention, like, “What are your designs on my daughter?” Is that something you’ve considered?

JH: I tried to put that into the description of design as an end, as something that is in mind before one starts something.

LA: I always thought that there was a kind of Anglo definition of design which is an objective, and then there’s the Italian, which is the thing that you draw.

JH: Disegno.

LA: So which one is yours?

JH: I think it’s both-and. For the corporate situation it has to be, because there are two functions that design is playing. One

is to provide an image and a coherence, acting out the corporation’s will to form, the other is to allow it to function. It’s the taking place of the corporation itself and also the corporation’s behavior. It accounts for its ability to change. This is why the logo multiplies.

LA: It’s like a pattern.

JH: Right, pattern would be the one that’s closer to disegno.

LA: It’s the zombie. The zombie is design.

TH: But in the zombie case, there’s still the format/agency question. The formatting is more a generational one, and the agency is being displaced. There is an agency, but it’s an unmotivated agency. It’s a power that lies outside of the zombie. It doesn’t know why it’s doing what it is. It’s still the same question.

LA: There’s also a performative aspect to it. The format of the zombie is to walk around visibly. Is that your implication with the architects? You didn’t have just one zombie, you had a whole bunch of zombies.

JM: The notion of a disembodied subject as it comes through in the corporations is interesting because in some ways I’m trying to address architecture as field, that it operates both historically but through a mass intelligence. That’s always the case, probably, but within that set of work there’s an interest in animation or emergent principles that come out of a field. Not determined, specific intelligences but a mass intelligence. For me,

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that’s the zombie flash mob or anything like that. That’s the way that on one hand the field operates, and on the other the interest is in emergent systems and swarm in design itself, there’s a funny overlap. Some of it has to do with the adequacy of the metaphor to describe the condition and the design intention.

For me there’s a problem in working through the legacy of this period that we’re talking about in terms of articulating a new position. What I get out of this conversation is the distinction between trying to generate a new concept out of the material as opposed to offering a corrective to a previous situation. The answer to the thing can never be that it’s wrong. For me, the answer to the thing always has to be that it works through its implications into the next iteration. As an operative critic, I’m trying to situate myself into that and offer a framework so that can become legible. It’s interesting in this context to see that that’s a very different kind of effort that inherently involves speculation and making stuff up. Trying to see if those things can achieve a certain kind of gravity.

LA: I’m making a lot of stuff up as well.

JM: But the aspiration is to offer a corrective to previous narratives that illuminates possibility.

LA: I’m going to give you a polemical response, which is that you think you have to deal with those myths, but you really don’t. The field of architecture today thinks that it has to deal with those myths because it’s their inheritance or whatever. The

lesson from the archive of 1968 is that they felt immense pressure to deal with some inheritance, and they did in some ways, but they also completely threw it out the window, and it was very difficult.

JM: I appreciate that.

LA: It was very difficult, and it was a very intelligent effort. In a way, the built work belies how little they actually took from what they had learned, how much they invented, and I would say that the field is way too concerned with how to reinvent history. There’s a lot more freedom than all that.

JM: I think we’re actually on the same side of this question. For me, the notion of the identification of the zombie was trying to identify the contingency of that position, and with the new casualty thing, that you could generate new things. It’s not historically motivated. One could start to speculate in a different way. The zombie is an endgame of a certain kind of thought that manifests in a certain kind of work. As I’m working through this material trying to offer up other images, one can imagine the end of one thing and the beginning of another with a more radical break. The zombie thing is a diagnostic for precisely the condition you’re talking about. It’s not a recipe for the future.

LA: But you’re still talking about people who are concerned with being continuous or discontinuous. The reason the New York Urban League project is interesting to me is that it’s pure pragmatic opportunism: someone needs a myth, someone needs a

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subject that is empty. If that had worked, that would have been fantastic. However we can make that happen today…

JM: My point with the Ruminations piece is to precisely identify what you’re talking about. People relate to this myth because they think they have to, and they don’t. That’s precisely my point is to identify that, not the inevitability of it, but the way they fall. What I’m trying to bring out in that piece is that that identification is partially incomplete. They’re cognizant of their partiality. They are able to let it inform their work with a full set of haunting things. They don’t fully articulate things because they assume so much. I’m trying to draw light to that condition in precisely the same ways you are, but from a different angle.

TH: I think that you’re very much in parallel, just as a diagnosis and prescription. You’re not actually in conflict. Let me just open the floor to the other participants and audience for questions.

Jeffrey Kipnis (JK): I have a couple questions if that’s alright. One is, do you make distinctions among theory, history and criticism in your work, and are those distinctions valuable? More importantly, in the middle- to late- ‘80s and early ‘90s, the breakaway from theory shifted architectural criticism to the discussion of effects rather than processes. One of the things that I find interesting listening to all three of you is that you maintain the mythology of effects without its historical positioning

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and its institutional positioning, or even its economic positioning, as if it was self-evident. I’m wondering if the regime of effects has become a self-evident mythology for criticism, or are you going to be able to offer us a critique of that at any point? Or is that not what we’re interested in? Was there an incredible success at the overturning of justification that we’re stuck with effects for eternity?

LA: I’m not interested in effects.

JK: But the reality effect seems to be something you’ve emphasized.

LA: Yes, absolutely. I was trying to give

some landmark theory that people would understand, but I would address the issue of effect from the point of view of history. From the point of view of criticism I’m not interested in effects, but from the point of view of history the discourse of effects is precisely the discourse on figuring out agency, intention and unintentional things. I’m very interested in that, but not through architecture. Institutions are effects in a way that’s not architectural.

JK: But the argument you gave about Ranke and Burkhardt was one about processes, not about effects. They weren’t people interested in the degree to which they would be instrumental, but what was the most authenticated version of process. That

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seems to be a relapse in the relationship of criticism, at least for me, to an argument that’s been overturned, as much as I appreciate it; and I cannot wait to call Peter [Eisenman] and tell him about your bringing up the Harlem Plan. I’m going to record his comments.

LA: Peter knows I’m writing this. I’ll say that I was not theoretically consistent in this presentation, and the place in my work where I feel most pressure to be theoretically consistent is not a forum like this one. When I present my history of architectural institutions to historians of other things I feel very much the pressure to use words like effect and agency, and I would not use the word effect. That’s sort of a lame response, but I do think that for me criticism is the type of writing where I have no professional obligation. I can talk about things and not get the pre-professional questions.

There the question of effects has nothing to do with the ‘90s switch in criticism to effects. For me, it’s purely the question of whether the culture industry in which we are now operating is just an effect. Was that the effect of theory or did theory create that? That’s the particular effect that I’m interested in, not the fact that the IAUS was a very glamorous place, and the fact that it produced some of the most difficult and important texts in architectural theory. I’m sure it’s connected to the ‘90s shift to criticism of effect, but I’m interested in the earlier, the original, effect. Culture industry plus theory equals what? Which one came first? Which one is cause and which one is effect?

JH: I certainly wouldn’t want to call the critique of process an accomplished deed. The aim, for me, the critical focus here, is to articulate a body of what you and I call theory that would not theorize itself as such. There is in fact an articulate genealogy of designers, members of organizations in the archive of twentieth century corporate America that can be mined in order to explain an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon for architectural and art historical discourse. Art history at the moment has very little capacity to interpolate something like General Electric. It really cannot describe either it, if it is a thing—of course I take the position that it’s not a thing—it cannot describe its effects, and it certainly cannot describe how it works. This I think is unfortunate. The political and critical project would be to try to arm architectural history and criticism with, to get right down to it, a series of words that would allow it to begin that project.

DiscriminationPanel Number Two

This panel considered the role of qualitative judgments in architectural writing and explored the means and frameworks by which it is possible to make such claims today.

WinningJeannie Kim

My disclaimer for this is that as someone who was trained as an historian it’s now a bit weird to be in a position where I’ve abandoned that project and I’m talking about what I do every day, but I’ll give it a shot.

The National Design Awards have been given every year for the past decade by Cooper-Hewitt, a Smithsonian Institution, with the premise that the awards recognize the best in American design. In an effort to distance the granting of the awards from the museum itself, a curated jury is invited annually to review submissions and choose winners over the course of several days. As with design awards in general, the notion of the National Design Awards has become rather mundane, celebrating past achievement rather than recognizing innovative methodologies or processes. The awards also have to combat a general saturation of accolades in the design disciplines. In architecture alone, the esteemed Pritzker, Rome, RIBA and AIA Gold Medal have been joined by the Emporus Awards for skyscraper of the year, the World Architecture Festival Awards and the International High Rise Competition, which is atomized to the point of being limited to buildings over 100 stories.

It is clear from just the images of the past ten years of the National Design Awards that this particular interpretation of design innovation from the first decade of the twenty-first century is in fact a reactive one. Although there are some moments (particularly in 2005, when Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and Stefan Sagmeister won, or in 2007 with Jonathan Ive) when the awards have been at least timely if not projective. Just because I know that the history of the

National Design Awards has a fairly limited audience—I myself had literally no idea who had won in the past before taking this job—I’ll slow down and remind everyone of precisely who in fact has won what is arguably the most important comprehensive design award in this country. In Lifetime Achievement:

2000 Frank Gehry2001 Robert Wilson2002 Dan Kiley2003 I.M. Pei w/ Leila and Massimo Vignelli2004 Milton Glaser2005 Eva Zeisel2006 Paolo Soleri2007 Antoine Predock2008 Charles Harrison

In the very short-lived category of American Original:

2000 John Hejduk and Morris Lapidus2001 Geoffrey Beene

It quickly lost steam, but I love the fact that in 2000 both John Hejduk and Morris Lapidus won. In the category of Design Mind: (from this point on finalists will appear in brackets next to the winners)

2005 Katherine and Michael McCoy2006 Paola Antonelli2007 Robert Ventuti and Denise Scott-Brown2008 Michael Beirut (Michael Sorkin, Bruce Nussbaum)

In Architecture:

2000 no award

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2001 Peter Eisenman (Asymptote, Pierre Koenig)2002 Steven Holl (Rick Joy, SHoP)2003 Tod Williams + Billie Tsien (ARO, Fredric Schwartz)2004 Rick Joy with Polshek Partnership (Joseph Spear, Rafael Vinoly)2005 DS+R (Tom Kundig, Antoine Predock)2006 Thom Mayne (Bernard Tschumi, Stanley Saitowitz)2007 Office dA (Enrique Norten, Dan Rockhill)2008 Tom Kundig (LOT-EK, Weiss/Manfredi)

Because our collective disciplinarity is ostensibly represented by this category, I’d like to pause and note the fact that in 2000 no one actually deserved this award. I should also mention the awards process briefly. Nominations are solicited from approximately forty people in each state; these include critics, academics, past winners and others. Nominees—who are required to have their primary practice in the United States for at least seven years—are then asked to submit their portfolios, which are reviewed by a multi-disciplinary jury in the spring.

Despite the strange trajectory of architecture winners and finalists seen here, it is difficult when one thinks of the context of American design to think of an established practice that could potentially redirect the mood swings of the previous nine years. Who is missing, in other words, and how can this list be validated? Is the intellectual

project of architecture recoupable in the context of a juried award? I think the 2009 winner is a small step forward, perhaps due to the fact that this year’s jurors think of architecture in a way I’m sympathetic toward. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you who that is, because I didn’t finish the press release before flying here yesterday. [Editor’s Note: 2009 Winner SHoP Architects, Finalists ARO, Michael Maltzan]

I also felt somewhat responsible for undoing some of the damage of the 2008 season. Although the architecture winner for last year generated lots of money for the gala (which happens to be the museum’s only real fundraiser) and also a lot of press (including a feature article in the New York Times Magazine and Men’s Vogue) the selection caused a lot of ire within the discipline among the limited population that cares about such things.

Here are the winners in Communication Design, a category that historically has been a little bit less nostalgic than most of the others:

2000 Ralph Appelbaum (Fabien Baron, April Greiman, Stefan Sagmeister)2001 John Maeda (Ed Fella, Lorraine Wild)2002 Lucile Tenzazs (Pablo Ferro, Maira Kalman)2003 Robert Greenberg (Cynthia Breazeal, Joseph Holtzman)2004 Graphical.media (MTV, Second Story)2005 Stefan Sagmeister (2x4, Pentagram)2006 2x4 (Chip Kidd, Jake Barton/Local Projects)

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2007 Chip Kidd (Paula Scher/Pentagram, C&G Partners)2008 Scott Stowell (Stephen Doyle, Prologue Films)

Corporate Achievement, an award that is given to an institution or corporation that embraces design as part of its ethos:

2000 Apple2001 Tupperware2002 Whirlpool Corporation2003 Target2004 Aveda2005 Patagonia2006 Nike2007 Adobe2008 Google, Inc. (OXO, JetBlue)

I want to note that though it has always been defined that way, 2009 is the first time the award is actually given to an institution and not a corporation. [Editor’s Note: 2009 Winner: Walker Art Center, Finalists Dwell Magazine, Heath Ceramics] Fashion Design:

2003 Tom Ford (Chritina Kim/Dosa, Narciso Rodriquez)2004 Yeohlee Teng (Narciso Rodriguez, Marc Jacobs)2005 Toledo Studio (Project Alabama, Maria Cornejo)2006 Maria Cornejo (Thom Browne, Peter Som)2007 Rick Owens (Narciso Rodriguez, Phillip Lim)2008 Ralph Rucci (Thom Browne, Zac Posen)

Interior Design, a category that is populated by architects rather than actual interior designers:

2005 Richard Gluckman (Hugh Hardy, Michael Gabellini)2006 Michael Gabellini (Anabelle Selldorf, Tsao & McKown)2007 Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (David Rockwell, Tsao & McKown)2008 David Rockwell (Deborah Berke, Diane Lewis)

Landscape Design:

2000 Lawrence Halprin (Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, Samuel Mockbee)2001 Julie Bargman (Diller + Scofidio, LOT-EK)2002 James Carpenter (Anne Whilston Spirn, George Hargreaves)2003 Michael van Valkenburgh (Laurie Olin, Rocky Mountain Institute)2004 William McDonough (Andropogon, Ned Kahn)2005 Ned Kahn (Peter Walker, Kathryn Gustafson)2006 Martha Schwarz (Ken Smith, Andrea Cochran)2007 Peter Walker (Ken Smith, Field Operations)2008 OLIN (Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd, Stoss Landscape Urbanism)

And finally Product Design:

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2000 Paul MacCready (Niels Diffrient, Chuck Holberman, Ted Muehling)2001 David Kelley/IDEO (Maharam/Nike)2002 Niels Diffrient (Blu Dot, Ayse Birsel)2003 Herman Miller (Antenna, Suzanne Tick)2004 Yves Behar (Interface, Burt Rutan)2005 Burt Rutan (Boym Partners, Bill Stumpf)2006 Bill Stumpf (Antenna, Jonathan Ive)2007 Jonathan Ive (Smart Design, Karim Rashid)2008 Antenna (Karim Rashid, Boym Partners)

So who decides? Each year the jury is selected by the person in my position in conversation with the director of the museum. The juries are composed of respectable people from the various disciplines, but it becomes even more of a surprise, for example, that there was no architecture award given in 2000 despite the presence of Daniel Libeskind and William Mitchell on the jury. There are very broad guidelines given to the jury, basically the only direction the museum provides, resulting in subsequent, somewhat predictable outcomes. Fifty-eight percent of the winners come from the Northeast, eighty-eight percent of them are white, and they’re overwhelmingly male.

I apologize that this talk is basically about what I do for a living. My current job more closely resembles that of the wedding planner than someone with an actual critical

project. You’ll have to bear with me for some navel-gazing.

The honorees are fêted in a celebration at the White House. The previous administration was particularly fond of dessert, evident in the fact that half the press photos provided of the event were actually of the dessert course. One was actually topped with Pop Rocks, which led to some confusion among the older guests who thought they were having minor episodes when they began bursting in the back of their throats. It doesn’t need to be said that this will be a much more exciting event to be a part of this year. The awards are celebrated at the museum in the fall with a week of free admission, public programs and a gala attended by people like Dennis Hopper, Zac Posen and Parker Posey, and Diane Lewis. This is the wedding part. An enormously expensive tent is set up over the garden in the back of the Carnegie Mansion, and six hundred fifty guests are meant to be transported by the décor. Last year we couldn’t afford to drape the ceiling, but the theme was having recycled wedding party elements used as centerpieces in an Alice in Wonderland, then afterward they would all be returned to the same place they came from.

There are several other programs associated with the National Design Awards. There’s the business breakfast, featuring last year a panel discussion between Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek, Marissa Maier of Google, Bob Greenberg of RGA and Amy Raiden, who until the recent financial downturn was the chief innovation officer at Citigroup. There’s the educator’s open house, when public school K-12 teachers

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come and learn about how to introduce design into their curriculum. There’s the winner’s panel, the teen fair, which is actually the most fun, where designers including Tim Gunn come and sit around small café tables, then six hundred New York City high school kids come and ask them about what they do. This is actually the most intimidating event, because there’s nothing like six hundred high school kids to make you feel like you were a total loser in high school. This year, the National Design Awards Gala and related events will coincide with an exhibition celebrating the past ten years of winners. It will open in the fall and travel to four venues around the country.

Despite my skepticism about the role of the awards in a critical context, framing the past decade through this unreliable filter has prompted me to think a lot about

audience and also the year 1982, which I will tentatively suggest here is our last watershed moment, and could be a way to frame the first decade of the awards for the purpose of this exhibition. I want to suggest that since 1982 there has been a process of domestication of the technological innovations of that year, while also being aware that it’s creating a new myth in order to close this past decade of work.

Through various media channels, coverage of the National Design Awards reaches a subscription audience of two hundred million people. That terrifying statistic comes from our marketing department, so I’m not sure how reliable it really is, but the opportunity to curate an exhibition about the awards is also an invitation to collectivize the past decade of design. I don’t mean to suggest that this

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exhibition is somehow going to present a new way of critically understanding the work of the Polshek Partnership or Rick Joy, but it could grant projective meaning to an otherwise nostalgic body of work. I’m testing out a way to bookend the exhibition.

So why 1982? In 1982, Kevin Roche won the Pritzker Prize. This year’s winner will actually be announced tomorrow. In general, the National Design Awards, like the Pritzker is sometimes too late, occasionally right on time, but with few exceptions tends to mark the end of one’s career rather than the beginning of something interesting. Architects, and designers more generally, have a thing for associating movements or generations with singular dates: the year 1000; 1789; 1917; 1932; 1945;1968. But 1982 can perhaps be seen as a predictive rather than a reactive year, and one that transformed the way that design is produced rather than just what it looks like.

This is an obvious and belabored moment, but “Blade Runner” was released in June of this year, and “Tron” a month later. Our contemporary urban condition is prefigured here, as it often is in movies, but movies like “Blade Runner” also offered a stark counterpoint to the prevailing view of architectural formmaking at that moment. Construction of Michael Graves’ Humana Building in Louisville would begin that fall, and, as additional context, James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie would also be completed that year. Of course, simultaneously there were indications that the apotheosis of the crisis of architectural form represented by the Humana Building would be rather short-lived.

Zaha Hadid would win the Peak

competition, Peter Eisenman won the competition for the Wexner Center, and although the firm was actually established in 1978, Herzog & de Meuron would complete their first two significant projects in 1982, housing in Basel and the Freie Photographic Studio in Weil-am-Rhine.

Autodesk released the first version of AutoCAD in February of 1982, Sun Microsystems was established in the same month, and although it was a commercial failure, Apple released the Lisa, the first personal computer with a Graphical User Interface—in other words, windows, menus and icons rather than just text.

Adobe was also established in 1982, founded to develop the Postscript language, which now has been supplanted by its own successor the PDF, but essentially made it possible to print high-quality graphics and text on the same page. Other things it did well included device-independent printing and on-the-fly rasterization. Two years later, Apple’s Laserwriter would become the first printer to ship with Postscript already installed, sparking the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s. A year later Adobe would release the first version of Photoshop, a program that has fundamentally changed the way that design is conceptualized, rendered and distributed.

The Intel 286 microprocessor was also released in 1982, allowing for the processing of sixteen megabytes of RAM as opposed to one. This led to the development of multitasking applications like Photoshop. Although the Intel 286 was rendered obsolete by 1990, running an application like Photoshop wasn’t even possible before 1982.

Although it was first launched in August

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of 1981, MTV reached thirteen million households by January of 1982. Responsible for changing our understanding of visual culture, and, as many alarmist articles of the eighties would claim, inundating our youth with too many images, MTV also more broadly contributed to a shift in our understanding of advertising and branding; an impact felt less keenly in architecture, perhaps, but one that was decidedly transformative in other design disciplines. For anyone who was alive before 1982, you’ll recall the difference between network commercials at the time versus MTV’s approach to advertising and branding. They were vastly different.

Mitsubishi Diamond Vision installed a twenty-six by thirty-six foot screen at Shea Stadium in 1982. Large-scale video displays were also installed at Foxboro Stadium and the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the same year. The now ubiquitous large-scale video display was notable for its optimal viewing angles, allowing spectators to enjoy the view from any seat because of its use of four dots rather than three to produce a single color pixel. This allowed for pixels to be shared dynamically as patterns moved across a screen. The explicit architectural connection in this case is still somewhat latent and largely suggested in movies, but if we return to the idea that the awards are somewhat nostalgic or reactive by nature, it should be said that this is the first year that the museum will give an award in Interaction Design. It was by far the most interesting category and one that is moving more quickly than any other design discipline. It is also very obviously contaminating all of the other fields in a way that will require more critical

attention in the near future. A few examples of the resonance of

Diamond Vision technology in architecture are UN Studio’s Galleria Department Store in Seoul where the façade is a moving LED screen, Peter Cook’s Kunsthaus in Graz where the lighting effects make an arguably ugly building slightly better, and perhaps U2’s Vertigo tour of 2006 where seven retractable, transparent LED curtains produced a virtual space on the stage. One could also bring up the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympiad, which ended in a spectacular recreation of the building itself as a result of all the lights.

This rambling job description has no conclusion, but I want to end with the fact that 1982 was also the end of the last major recession in this country. It was of course a very different one, since the ‘81-‘82 recession was at some level deliberately caused by the Federal Reserve whereas the Fed is pretty much powerless in our current economic crisis, but—and this is admittedly a very familiar refrain—bad economies are often good for design. I remain hopeful that 2009 could be our next 1982, although if you’ve been following the debate being played out in the New York Times and Design Observer, it is also clear that designers, like everyone else, rightly hate economic crises. I’m positing this as a possible way to cap off the potential catalogue to the exhibition, but the impulse to rethink design and to embrace issues such as utility and beauty or innovation and practicality simultaneously are not new, nor are they limited to periods of apparent crisis, but perhaps they could now happen more quickly and potentially be even more far reaching.

KIM

Britain’s Ugliest Building

Timothy Hyde

Though it’s tempting, I won’t keep you in suspense: the Southbank Arts Centre in London is “Britain’s Ugliest Building.” So declared a survey in the Daily Mail newspaper right after the completion of the first phase of the building in 1967. That epithet has attached to the complex with remarkable consistency over the past forty years, supplemented now by a supporting cast of adjectives, like surly, bunker-like, dank (according to Richard Rogers), bleak (so says Nicholas Pevsner), and so on. Advocates have tended to offer only tempered praise of the building. For example, Peter Murrow, writing in The Architect’s Journal said he could only hope that over time would “assert itself and make people learn to like what at first was unfamiliar and hateful.”

In a 1968 review of the Southbank Arts Centre, Charles Jencks acknowledged the preponderance of hostile reactions. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” he said. But Jencks countered these reactions with a challenge: “All this criticism which has occurred, while understandable, is slightly beside the point. The building was probably intended to be conventionally ugly. So while critics may have reacted in the right way, they have drawn the wrong conclusions. It is rather as if the critic reacted correctly to a gargoyle, a grotesque or a Francis Bacon only to reject them as un-beautiful.” In this talk, I want to take up Jencks’ challenge. What might be the correct conclusions to be drawn from the ugliness of this architecture? What conclusions might be drawn from ugliness more generally as an aesthetic, experiential or theoretical condition in architecture? I want to tell a story about the

Hayward in order to suggest that perhaps ugliness is a matter of opinion, but of a very particular kind, a kind of nagging uncertainty that actually hinders rather than assists resolutions of judgment.

The Southbank Arts Centre stands along the Thames River in London, next to the Royal Festival Hall that was the centerpiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Where that building belatedly adopted the linear forms and referential conceits of pre-war Modernism, the architects of the Southbank Centre employed the post-war techniques of New Brutalism. Inside the clustering, irregular forms—that disregard compositional geometries, that ignore existing configurations implied in the site—three volumes contain the programmatic spaces of the Southbank Centre. Two are concert halls—the Queen Elizabeth Hall facing the river, and the Purcell Room behind—and an art gallery, the Hayward, at the rear of the site. Much of the lower level of this complex is given over to car park, service access and also to a large undercroft that opens toward the river. Above this level, a deck loosely wraps around the full exterior of the buildings. A pedestrian who descends down onto this deck from Waterloo Bridge or who climbs up to the deck from below, then is able to circumnavigate along a rambling route up and down stairs, along a series of widening and expanding pathways along the full perimeter of the buildings. Along this path all of the surfaces—the deck, the walks, the walls, the railings, the steps—have the unvarying grayness of a material palette limited to precast aggregate panels and exposed cast concrete.

The design here was the work of the

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Department of Architecture and Civic Design of the Greater London Council, but three young architects on the council could claim credit for its being conventionally ugly: Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton, who by the time Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the building in 1968 were very well-known as members of Archigram. The emerging attitude of Archigram may be in evidence, but the design owes much more to projects like Alison and Peter Smithson’s project for Sheffield University, which Reyner Banham had invoked in 1955 to elucidate the exemplary traits of New Brutalism: the use of materials as found, the constitution of structure as a relationship of parts, and the production of an affecting image. These three traits, Banham argued, were the constitutive properties of the architectural je-m’en-foutisme or “bloody-mindedness” of New Brutalism.

It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the ugliness attributed to the Southbank Arts Centre is precipitated by its Brutalist approach. The rawness of the concrete surfaces, the insistent articulation of separated parts, the desire to produce an image impressed upon a viewer’s consciousness: together these constitute its ugliness. The adjective ugly is never far from any Brutalist building, of course, but I want to suggest that Banham’s tenets of Brutalism can be used to open up toward a concept of ugliness, a different concept of ugliness, that is something much more than a companion term for appearance.

PileRather than regard the modus operandi of brutalism as nurturing qualities that produce ugliness, consider that Brutalism might better be understood as the toleration of deficiencies whose consequence is ugliness: less the production of ugliness than an insufficiency of not-ugliness. Charles Jencks proposed that a confrontation with the rambling architecture of the Southbank Centre readily incited the verdict of ugliness because “there is no underlying coherence, no visual logic which helps to explain the functional logic; the programmatic spaces hide behind a confusing, hostile pile of jagged in situ sludge.” One of the architects, Warren Chalk, explained that “the basic original concept was to produce an anonymous pile subservient to a series of pedestrian walkways: a sort of Mappin Terrace, for people rather than goats.” Mappin Terrace, an artificial landscape built at the London Zoo in 1914, was an experimental use of reinforced concrete, so, despite its appearances, very much a considered design of form.

Mappin Terrace, though, has since served as a habitat for a wide variety of different animals—emus at present—that suggest that its shape, while purposeful, is not at all precise. Like Mappin Terrace, the pile at Southbank was fashioned for use and occupation without the aim of a precise compositional whole or a precise form. Individual parts do have specific criteria—for example, the concert halls have their acoustical imperatives with ramifications for the selection of finishes and for the regulation of airflow through their ductwork—but outside, on the

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decks, people are free to circulate, free to enter or bypass the venues, and their movements are accommodated with figural contours rather than precise formal determinations. The asymmetries, the sectional shifts, the ubiquitous expansions and contractions tolerate so much variation that any perspective continuities of configuration here dissolve. The massing of the complex, decomposed into two heaps front and back, similarly refuses to admit causations, hierarchies or relevancies; the parts here fend for themselves or simply compete with one another, not only the three programmatic centers, but also their components. No a priori logic generates the differentiated form here, nor does a totalizing frame harness them a posteriori. The visible but indeterminate form results from the accumulation of incremental decisions,

each of which alters the configuration to which it has been added, but without tending towards any fixed or determinate end. The architecture is, in fact, a pile.

Suspended in a process of formation, a constant increase or decrease, a pile is always an insufficiency of form, an instance of informe. In the pile alongside the Thames, no fixed relation to site, no hierarchy of movement, no interdependency of structure and no geometric order has determined a fixed arrangement of parts. This indeterminacy, like the mountainous shape of Mappin Terrace, enables possibilities prescribing or proscribing future eventualities. This un-formedness in the pile also instigates the state of ugliness, which unlike Albertian concinnitas permits excisions and additions to be imagined without guilt.

Other architects have not hesitated

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in imagining alterations to the Southbank Arts Centre. In 1979 Architectural Review published a proposal to fill in the voids and overhangs of the complex with glazed enclosures, in effect smoothing out the irregular contours of the original buildings. In 1994, a competition solicited larger scale interventions that would redress the deficiencies of the brutalist buildings without interrupting the presumptively complete form of the adjacent Royal Festival Hall. Two finalists proposed the same strategy: a roof, to be built over the Southbank Centre. For Michael Hopkins, the roof should be one of his trademark tents: eight pylons stretching a bowed fabric roof across the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery. The new profile would give the Royal Festival Hall a very crude double, with the original shape of the arts

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complex now disguised underneath a more uniform shell that mimics the adjacent form of the Royal Festival Hall.

The other finalist, Richard Rogers, also sought to reconcile the arts complex with the Festival Hall by revealing the latter and concealing the former. He proposed to spread an enormous glazed roof across the site; a glass wave that rises up from the base of the Festival Hall and sweeps over the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall, submerging them inside what was immediately dubbed a new Crystal Palace. The remedial ambition of the design is evidenced by the smooth, sweeping roof enshrouding the disorderly pieces of the original complex. The wave answers the ugliness of the ugliness of the original architecture—answers to what I’m calling its lack of form—with an excessive form

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that contains the existing elements as exhibits, now contained within a glass vitrine.

StainIn both of these remedies, the materials—a smooth glass wave or a taught plastic skin—would counter the Brutalist architecture just as much as their formal consolidations were to do. Both proposals would have transformed the exterior spaces into interiorized spaces to make the terraces and the walkways habitable for cafes, shops and so on. I’ll return to the question of interiority, but I first want to make the more straightforward observation that these roofs would also have kept out the rain. Keeping the rain off the buildings would not merely be an architectural symptom of the perennial British concern for the weather, it would also directly address a further aspect of ugliness. Recall that another exemplary trait of Brutalism was its use of materials “as found.” As found referred not to a preference for unalloyed materials, but rather for the unadulterated display of materials in architectural form.

In the Soutbank Arts Centre, precast concrete panels, poured concrete surfaces surround any visitor; the roofs, the columns, the walls, cast as one piece, assert the structural primacy of that material, while board markings or the grain of aggregate on individual surfaces shows direct attention to sensible qualities. Many critics of the architecture of the complex have singled out for particular comment this pervasive concrete: its drab grayness in the weak light, its coarse texture, its inhospitable coolness, and inevitably its appearance

when it rains. A sympathetic reviewer in 1967 offered a prophetic warning: “For the visual excitement of turning a roof into a wall without changing material or finish and without tiresome drips or the petty intervention of a gutter one has to accept a bedraggled look on a rainy day, possibly resulting in permanent staining.” Such stains upon the concrete surface, which the architecture does encourage with its lack of a drip along the roof edges, produce an additional state of ugliness distinct from the aspect produced by its unformedness. Mark Cousins has argued that a stain, however it’s caused, is a form of excess:

A stain must be cleansed. Is this because the stain is ugly? The stain is not an aesthetic issue as such, it is a question of something that should not be there, and so it must be removed. The constitutive experience is therefore of an object that should not be there. In this way, it is a condition of ugliness.

The stain is as pervasive as the concrete it marks at the Southbank Centre, occurring in the damp streaks along vertical edges and also in the residual puddles scattered along many of its horizontal planes. Weathering has not been the only cause of the stained surface here; the undercroft, notorious now as an uninviting space appropriated by skateboarders, has been covered in graffiti: stain upon stain layered upon the concrete surface. The marks of the rainwater above and the marks of the graffiti below should not be distinguished from one another on account of their different provenance. Both are stains upon the architecture fostered by architecture’s own susceptibility to the state

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of ugliness. What response, then, does this

second register of ugliness, this thing out of place, warrant or compel? The necessary expedience of the as found approach certainly contributed to the conventional ugliness, as Jencks called it, of the architecture, but now, in this register, some desired experience is anticipated as well, revealed by the third tenet of brutalism, that the building should produce an affecting image. An image, Banham explained, “requires that the building should be an immediately apprehensible, visible entity, and that the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the experience of the building in use.” Banham added that the image was “something which is visually valuable,” which I take to mean something to which value can be attributed, not necessarily something already possessing a determinate value. Something which is visually valuable. While classical aesthetics assume this value to accrue in pleasure, something beautiful, for New Brutalism, Banham said, “Image may be defined as quadvisum perturbat, that which seen, affects the emotions,” affects them with pleasure, displeasure, or, pointedly, some mixture of these two.

Nicholas Pevsner, writing his entry on the Southbank Arts Centre for his authoritative Buildings of England series conceded that its walkways produced “a thrilling experience, if the weather is fine and you are at leisure.” “But,” he asked, “what if it rains? What if you are late? What if you find steps a strain?” Then, the nearest comparison to the walkway’s “bleak effect [would] be Piranesi’s Carceri.”

Pevsner’s critique reveals that the first two states of ugliness at the Southbank Arts Centre—its irresolution of form, and the appearance of the stain—join with a third aspect of ugliness, the discomfiting sense of an un-empathetic architecture. The encounter between person and architecture here is all roughness: the coarse concrete surfaces that are both tactile and injurious, the rambling terraces that solicit chance encounters, but foil planned itineraries, the distortions of scale and orientation that defy commensuration with the body, and the unsettling disarticulation of the architecture into parts and fragments throughout.

IrritantHere, then, is a third register of ugliness, not ugliness within the architecture, but ugliness as the relationship between the architecture and a person who encounters it. When Mark Cousins suggests that the ugly object is an object out of place, it is not the disturbance of the place that constitutes ugliness, but rather that the ugly object—by looming too large, by already exceeding its own boundaries—threatens some sovereign subject. The ugly is that which is neither contained within itself nor capable of being safely contained by something else. As, then, a disproportionality between architecture and a person, ugliness prevents the proper definition of boundaries or of separate and intact exteriors.

Ugliness therefore compels disgust, as rendered in all of its actions, in all of its metaphors of repulsion. This self-preserving repulsion, whether in the form of vomiting, turning away or simply crushing something underfoot, is intended to sharply and

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immediately distance a person from the ugly thing that confronts them. Yet however hostile the criticism of the Southbank Centre has been, I would not argue that its ugly architecture has prompted such a violent disgust. The bleakness that Pevsner feels—the oft-disparaged streaked concrete surfaces, the difficulty felt in navigating the decks—accumulate in the perception that the building is not sufficiently accommodating to its human users. All these elements prompt degrees of what is obviously displeasure, and though disgust would be at the extreme of the spectrum of displeasure, I would argue that ugliness has a more subtle key, one that prompts an affect much more akin to irritation.

Where the urgency of disgust compels an unmistakably urgent withdrawal, the nagging effect of irritation emerges from a relentless but unavoidable proximity. The ugliness of this architecture irritates because of such a proximity, because it produces the sense of a persistent and mistaken conflation of architecture and person. Unlike emotions, affects do not narrate the experience of a singular coherent subject, but rather displace that experience into a separate and encompassing mood. Affects are the relationship between consciousness and circumstance, but they’re detached from individual persons. Consequently, affects are more diffuse than emotions, they are vague, not unlike a pile or a stain. An ugly feeling, such as envy or anxiety, is induced by the lingering proximity of its source, condensing all of the interrelated factors of a given situation rather than apportioning those factors, as in the sharper emotions of disgust or anger. An ugly feeling emerges

without precise causation from the layered stimuli of a given situation, and the ugly feeling provoked by the Southbank Centre thus summarizes the several and the different instigations of a felt antipathy into a generalized but very vivid mood: irritation. While the active manner of disgust would provoke a violent overcoming of its objective cause through flight or fight, the passive manner of an ugly feeling like irritation could only be extinguished by a complete transformation of the situation from which the feeling emerges. In the absence of such a transformation, irritation persists as a simultaneous pulling together and pushing apart of the person and the architecture.

PuddleUgliness is colloquially invoked as a failing, but in its capacity to synthesize different dimensions of vagueness—the irregular form, the stained surface, the irritating affect—and thereby produce a consequence which, unlike beauty is not affirmative, and unlike estrangement is not self-exhaustive, ugliness possesses a conceptual potential very much worthy of elaboration.

Last summer, the Hayward Gallery celebrated its fortieth anniversary with Psycho Buildings, an exhibition about the peculiar relationship between people and architecture. Psycho Buildings aimed to examine the relation between buildings and embodied minds, and to test emotion and intellectual engagement with physical structures. Familiar questions for architecture, but ones very aptly posed at the Hayward because of the poignancy of any encounter with the architecture of the Southbank Centre, let alone one deliberately

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sown with architectural traps. The artists in the Psycho Buildings

exhibition were each asked to design and produce an installation that would be located within or around some part of the Hayward Gallery. Most of these installations offered very overt reflections on interiority as a trope of psychological space or memory. Some did broach, though obliquely, the idea of ugliness. For example, Ernesto Neto’s stretched fabric room punctured by large involutions certainly flirts with the current formalism of the grotesque. Mike Nelson’s violent disfiguration of an upper gallery paid homage to Gothic narratives of imprisoned monsters, and also literally defaced and scarred the gallery surfaces. Ugliness did enter into these installations, but without inducing the compound sense of ugliness that I’m proposing is the real potency of the surrounding architecture.

The Hayward building has on its

uppermost level three sculpture terraces whose steeply angled parapets contribute to the overall restlessness of the Southbank Arts Centre. Though actually extensions of the gallery’s interior spaces, they imply that the lower pedestrian deck that forms the irregular surround at the entry level continues into, out of, and then through the buildings on an upper level. During the Psycho Buildings exhibition, the trapezoidal terrace on the southeastern corner of the building became the improbable site of a boating pond, installed by the artist collective Gelatin.

The installation, titled normally, proceeding and unrestricted with without title—a convolution of the nautical definition used in accident logs— consisted of three plywood boats, a floating jetty, and a pond created by filling the entire pan of the terrace up to the top edge of the surrounding parapet. The jetty was jerrybuilt from scrap and

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listed unexpectedly as you walked on it. The boats were inverted pyramidal shapes in which two people sat facing each other, one pulling at a pair of highly shortened oars and with two empty five-gallon water jugs as stabilizers. Clumsy but seaworthy, they could be propelled along the pond with reasonable facility. The depth of the pond wasn’t much more than a meter, but the black lining of the terrace and the reflections on the surface made it impossible to judge, and with the water up to the parapet edge, an exaggeration of dimension gave the sensation of a much more serious nautical endeavor, and one being conducted fifteen meters above the ground.

Physicality and experience were the mediums here, with resonant references directed back toward the Hayward building itself. The rickety jetty hammered together

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from bits certainly made use of the as found approach, and the resulting wooden pile was as formally incoherent, but as functionally capable as the surrounding concrete pile. Gelatin thereby produced what the exhibition pamphlet described as an incongruous “pastoral idyll, suspended above the ground and nestling against the Hayward’s concrete Brutalism.” Charles Jencks had predicted in 1968 that the Southbank Arts Centre would create an architectural setting “where one can imagine deliberate acts of burlesque.” The boating pond was exactly that: a deliberate act of burlesque elicited by the architecture and therefore, I would argue, a fulfillment of its condition of ugliness.

Superimposed upon the architecture, the boating pond creates another puddle, larger and more purposeful, but not separate

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from the atmospheric manifestations of the architecture. The surface of the water both contradicts and echoes the board-formed concrete of the parapet. The smoothness it creates—which, by the way, realizes Banham’s hope that Brutalism might overturn the customary subordination of topology in architectural thought—differs from the smoothness of those enveloping roofs that had once been proposed. Not a wave, now, but a puddle. A puddle embedded within the ugliness of the architecture rather than overcoming that ugliness. At the outer edge of the terrace, the seeping stain of water now results from the overflow of the pool, so that the stain—that which still does not belong—nevertheless is able to claim an equal priority to the surface through the performance of ugliness.

The boating pond, I would conclude, reveals that incongruity is exactly the positive experience that ugliness enables, demonstrated as well by Gelatin’s own contribution to the Hayward Gallery postcard series. Incongruity, a state of misalignment or misappositeness, shares the characteristic lack of correspondence between two respective domains—the building and the person—that I identified as a first quality of ugliness. As a condition of friction that does not arise to the state of conflict, incongruity also resembles the passive affect of an irritation that does not rise to disgust. Incongruity produces a curious state of equivalence, insofar as neither source of the incongruity may have a greater claim to rectitude than the other. Perhaps the terrace was a boating pond after all.

This plausible coexistence establishes

the potent subtlety of incongruity and by extension establishes the promise of ugliness itself. While a critical perspective will always capably highlight difference or contradiction, to do so it necessarily establishes the inequity of its two terms, the object and the critique. One of the two is registered as wrong or incorrect against the other. Incongruity, as I posit it here, results when both sources appear correct and with some measure of formal and mutual dependence, when both legitimately occupy the same space and time and are therefore naturalized within their given situation—or as was in the case of the boating pond, delightfully obvious yet at the same time totally impossible.

As it enables incongruity, the ugliness of the Southbank Arts Centre at once suspends and admits narration. It suspends it by diffusing emotion—which would narrate the experience of a subject—into affect, which does not, but also admits it through the fragmentary circumstance of the boating pond, which is an event fashioned in pieces, like a story becoming a plot. Narrative enters here long enough that experience, judgment and opinion occur, but it enters in pieces and without a clarifying referent so that affect persists. Ugliness is precisely what choreographs this process of admission and suspension. Incongruity, produced adjacent to the formal wholeness of beauty, slides immediately, inevitably, toward parity or some other critical mode. Ugliness, with its absence of wholeness and completion, with its ability to foster incongruities, has a generosity that beauty lacks. I’m happy to confirm, therefore, that the Southbank Arts Centre is in fact Britain’s Ugliest Building.

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Under ConstraintEnrique Walker

Under Constraint is the title of the talk, but also the title of a number of talks I’ve given before, a number of studios, and a number of papers. It’s actually following through on an argument that I raised in the mid-‘90s when I was doing graduate work at the AA that I then tested out and refined in a series of advanced studios I taught, primarily at Columbia University between 2003 and 2006. These are subsequently being produced as a series of texts, the second installment of which I will read as a foreword. It’s called “Under Constraint (Afterword) .” Judging by the speed of the installments I would say that the last was written some three years ago so it’s not really finalized, but it has, by and large, the attempt.

Raymond Roussel died at the Grande Albergo e delle Palme in Palermo the night of July 13th, or the morning of July 14th, 1933. Before his departure from Paris, he had entrusted his publisher with the posthumous publication of a book which would reveal, as he thought was his duty, the method he had used to write several of his books. Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres appeared two years later and earned Roussel the recognition he hoped it would, and had so intensely pursued since his sensations of glory when writing La Doublure at the age of nineteen.

Roussel completed his first book after six months, during which he was gradually filled with a euphoria of extraordinary intensity. He worked day and night, without the slightest deviation, and with no sign of fatigue. I shall reach great heights, he claimed; there lies within me an immensely powerful glory like a shell about to explode.

His enthusiasm greatly diminished during the printing of the book and, since it eventually passed unremarked, completely extinguished after it was published. This failure plunged Roussel into a profound state of depression which lasted several years, and from which he never fully recovered. According to the doctor who later attended to him, following his crisis, Roussel still maintained the unshakeable conviction that glory was a fact. So throughout his life, he sought public success hoping that it would revive those earlier feelings of exaltation. Yet to no avail, for aside from the interest of some supporters, mainly the young surréalistes, who were far from the broad admiration Roussel strove for, his work attracted little attention. His books went unnoticed or were received with incomprehension; his plays, staged at his own expense to reach a larger audience, provoked scandals or were the object of derision.

Roussel found some glory elsewhere: with his piano performances, with his pistol-shooting trophies, with his design for a luxury caravan, with his patent for a system for insulating buildings, with his formula for an improved knight and bishop checkmate, and with his impersonations, where, as he claimed, his success was enormous and complete. During the last years of his life he attempted to recapture his earlier euphoria with the use of narcotics, which led to his death of an overdose. His will, deposited with his lawyer six months earlier, and seemingly his very last resort to achieve public recognition of his right to literary glory, instructed that a copy of Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres be sent to a list of twenty-two of his supporters, and that it

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then be issued for sale. A series of notes to his publisher prior to his departure to Sicily established the definite contents of the book and instructed that his photograph at the age of nineteen, the time when he felt he had l’étoile au front, appear on its frontispiece, as well as in all reissues of his works. This last book would reveal the secret to several of the others.

Roussel owed his gift of invention to a method which he had discovered at about the age of thirty, after the years of prospecting that followed the writing of his first book. The method entailed creating two phrases that sounded, and were spelled, almost identically, but had entirely different meanings, and then writing a story which would begin with one and end with the other. These pairs of homonymous or almost homophonic phrases would present a series of problems, or équations de faits, which it would then become necessary to solve logically. Thus the phrases, les vers de la doublure dans la pièce du Forban Talon Rouge [the lines of verse of the understudy in the play of Red-Heel the Buccaneer] and les vers de la doublure dans la pièce du fort pantalon rouge [the worms in the lining of the patch of the strong red trousers], were the basis for Chiquenaude; just as the phrases, demoiselle [young girl] à prétendent [suitor] and demoiselle [pavior’s beetle] à reître en dents [soldier of fortune in teeth] were the basis for the complicated apparatus Roussel described from page thirty-one onwards in Locus Solus. I shed blood over every phrase, he once confessed.

Roussel worked in complete seclusion and with great effort for a fixed number of hours each day, often to the point of

exhaustion. According to the rules of his game, once he established a pair of phrases with double meaning, or else diverted a found phrase into a homonym, he would have to solve the problem of bringing together the elements which derived from the pair, regardless of their disparity, and formulate their relationship on as realistic a level as possible, in a text written in the most neutral way. The method of word-pairing, not unlike a table de dissection, would offer the chance encounter of elements whose meticulous resolution would in turn release unforeseen invention. I have traveled a great deal, he said, yet from all these travels I never took anything for my books; imagination accounts for everything in my work. His posthumous book would explain his method, for he felt that future writers would perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully, yet also imbue the work with a secret, let alone install the fantasy that this secret was a key to its understanding. The work bears no inside, however, no hidden treasure, no mystery to be deciphered.

Raymond Roussel committed to a secret procedure that actually held no secret, a writing which did not entail a reading. The method does not actually shed light on the work itself, but rather on the workings that preceded the work. Just like in his novels, where mystification is followed by revelation, Roussel meant to explain his secret after his death. He thought it was his duty to do so, but also hoped that he could gain a little posthumous recognition. Only his very last book would afford Roussel the great heights for which he had always thought he was destined.

The premise of Under Constraint

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is relatively simple, it’s that a constraint, while being an obstruction, while being an obstacle, can become precisely an ally to production; it’s a critical tool of production. That being the assumption, and particularly in the case of architecture it would be too precious an element to be given over to a chance encounter of a number of conditions which lead often to a brief. So the assumption is that a constraint could actually be self-imposed, and therefore actually embraced as a voluntary and therefore an arbitrary restriction that could allow it to expand the work. Obviously the first step in this was to look back to a number of allies:

Raymond Roussel who decided to write certain of his books by using two homonymous, or almost homophonic, sentences as the beginning and end of his stories; Samuel Beckett decided to write his

in a language other than his own; Thomas Bernhard decided to write some of his own in one paragraph; Jerry Andrzejewsky decided to write a novel in one sentence; Georges Perec decided to write a novel without the use of a certain letter; Michel Butor decided to write a novel in the second person; Italo Calvino decided to write a novel with ten beginnings; Raymond Queneau decided to write a set of ten sonnets whose corresponding lines could be replaced by one another; Jacques Roubaud decided to write a collection of poems corresponding to the pieces of a game of go; Jacques Jouet decided to write poems corresponding to the stops on his metro journeys; Marcel Benabou decided to write a book by giving an account of his impossibility to write one; Gilbert Sorrenttino decided to write a novel by only resorting to questions;

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Harry Mathews decided to write a novel by… alas, he declined to reveal his decision.

You may recognize that actually most of the members of that list are members of the group Oulipo a French group founded in 1960 as a branch of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. It was founded by Raymond Queneau, a writer and mathematician, and by Francois Le Lionnais, a mathematician and also a writer. The group consisted of mathematicians and writers, and all the combinations of the two. The expressed goal was to look for new potential forms of literature by embracing severe mathematical constraints. The group was also deliberately formulated against Surrealism. Raymond Queneau was a member of the Surrealist group and was expelled as many others by [André] Breton. The first premise of Oulipo was that they oppose chance to constraint, and the second, interestingly enough entails the very structure of the group,

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is that as opposed to most French avant-garde groups that contained a very severe logic of expulsion, in Oulipo, once you’re a member, you’re always a member. You cannot be expelled, and by the same token you cannot resign. Even in the moment of death you remain a member, though Oulipo has provided an interesting exception, which is that if someone commits suicide in the presence of an officer, so as to ascertain that you did so, with the expressed desire to relinquish membership and restore freedom for eternity, then freedom could actually be granted. Thus far, all member of the Oulipo remain members of the Oulipo.

I’ll name a few of them in the picture. Other than Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais there’s Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Marcel Duchamp was—I mean is—a member—sorry —even though active for a very short period of time. Important for Oulipo is that they define their work in terms of two main strands, one what they call the analytic, which entails unearthing constraints of the past, the lipogram, the sonnet, structures that have actually been used in the past but were somehow forgotten. In so doing, they also inscribe themselves within a tradition of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Lewis Carroll, Laurence Sterne, Dante Alighieri and so on who they term plagiarists by anticipation, people who actually plagiarized their work, but they did it before they exist. The second strand of their work is called synthetic and it entails the invention of new constraints, constraints that did not exist before. It is within that trajectory that I’ll focus on one specific piece by Oulipo that I think allows us to shed light on a number of

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problems that are relevant to architecture, which is where I will wrap up.

The book, called Life A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi) by Georges Perec, was formulated in 1969—a year after 1968—but only completed in 1978. The book at the outset entailed a great challenge for Oulipo, which was an exactly six hundred page book. Up to that point Oulipo had primarily produced very small pieces that were exemplary of a certain constraint. They were ambitious about having a piece that would far exceed the boudoir exercise. The book was formulated upon three main projects, the first was to describe a building whose façade had been completely detached imaginarily. Perec’s source was a drawing by Saul Steinberg contained in the book The Art of Living of 1953 where basically the whole façade has been removed so you can see the inside. Perec indeed wanted to describe the inside of a building just as he was describing a number of places in Paris at the same time. The mere inventory of the objects inside the building would become the novel.

The second project that Perec had in mind was exclusively mathematical. It had to do with a challenge posed by Oulipo which had to do with a mathematical structure named the Graeco-Latin square of order 10. It had been conjectured as impossible until the sixties, when it was actually proven. So it was fresh mathematical stuff for Oulipo to test at the level of a novel. The structure, in simple terms, is basically two series of items, hence the name Graeco-Latin, usually Greek and Latin characters, placed in a grid and the rule entails that there should always be a pair in each part of the grid. None of the elements can be repeated in the same

row or column. One of the properties of the Graeco-Latin square is that by permutating rows and columns the structure remains intact.

The third one entailed Raymond Roussel. Perec wanted to write the history of a character called Bartlebooth. Bartlebooth combined two names, famous literary protagonists, one is Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, the other is Bartleby by Herman Melville. Indeed the character that Perec invented was someone who devoted his entire life to producing and solving jigsaw puzzles. It very much simulated the desire of Bartleby of preferring not to, as well as Raymond Roussel’s life, the fact that his whole life is constructed around a massive constraint of jigsaw puzzles.

At some point, Perec discovered that all three projects could actually be brought into one, which is when he superimposed the grid of the ten-by-ten grid across the section imagined by the Saul Steinberg drawing into a Parisian building of nine stories plus a basement. Each one of the rooms would become a chapter of book, and Bartlebooth would be simply the protagonist, one of the inhabitants. There are five rooms in his apartment visible from the street. The rules of the game for writing the book were that (a) as a true Oulipian, he had to decide the way in which he would tell the story. Being an Oulipian, he wouldn’t embrace either a realistic approach to the organization of the chapters by, let’s say, using a postman who’d go from flat to flat, or would also not use a completely chance-driven system of, say, taking a piece of paper one after the other. So he used what he called the Knight’s tour an old problem of chess, to cover an entire

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chess board with a knight without stopping more than once in every one of the cases. He covered the full board of ten-by-ten, adjusting from the eight-by-eight of the chessboard in order to define the order of the chapters, which starts with number one, and jumps across to exhaust the whole grid. Every time the knight touches all four edges, a new section begins.

The book has ninety-nine chapters as opposed to one hundred, and I’ll explain why in a second. Once he defined the order of the chapters, Perec had to define what was the content of the book, what he would inventory in the manner of Saul Steinberg’s drawing. So he used the Graeco-Latin square as a way of permutating a number of items that he classified in massive list of ten items of four elements each that would produce four hundred and twenty elements each distributed across the various chapters of the book. Each chapter would be given a list of forty-two elements ranging from the position and the activity of the character, to citations, the number of characters, the role the characters have, walls, floors, epochs, places, styles, furniture, the number of pages in the chapter, and so on and so forth. Each chapter would by and large be defined by a number of terms that had to be included forcibly within the writing of the chapter. Citations were incorporated in exactly the same pattern, ten citations for each one of the writers that Perec wanted to refer to.

In addition to those constraints, Perec gave himself three others, one of which was to incorporate the coordinates of the chapter, for example 2.7, within the writing of the chapter; secondly, to include an incidence of the time during which he was

writing the chapter into the chapter; and thirdly, to rewrite one of his previous pieces of work, published or unpublished, within each one of the chapters. It becomes some kind of massive autobiographical project that is actually rewriting and also publishing for the first time pieces that he had never published. Lastly—and I think this is actually where the argument basically starts—Perec included a false or missing element, the flaw within the system that allows the system to work. He deliberately incorporated error within the system. If you were to devote an entire life to track back the way in which the system worked you wouldn’t be able to, because the system effaces itself to start with. Perec decided to destroy one chapter to interrupt the Knight’s tour. The chapter preceding that one, which is sixty-six, ends with a girl biting the corner of a biscuit as if she were actually eating the following chapter.

Next is that the system of the Graeco-Latin square also prescribes four subsequent elements that are highlighted by the system as false or missing. In other words, whenever one of these four elements is false, Perec can actually change one of them, and he decides which one. In case he gets four subsequent elements highlighted under the name missing, he can cross one out. The two items are changing through time according to the different grids.

In the end, what you get is a critical point in terms of Perec’s work that goes from when he wrote the book without the letter e where a constraint was quantifiable, easily identifiable, yet by the same token, didn’t allow for the production of a different book. Life A User’s Manual, on the other

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hand, produced a completely different novel where the constraint was actually productive particularly because it was not quantifiable. In other words, Perec used actively the constraint in the first half, the first fifty chapters or so were actively engaging the constraint. Thereafter, once the novel had actually taken shape, he was slightly less rigorous with it because it didn’t matter in the long run, as opposed to A Void (La Disparition), where the inclusion of one letter e would ruin the entire exercise.

I would claim that the main argument here is that the very invisibility of the structure—what Perec called the scaffolding, an autonomous structure that would allow one to build the building, but could then be removed leaving no trace on the building—was a critical redefinition of the practice of constraints within Oulipo, one that I think becomes extremely relevant for the problems of architecture. He and the Oulipians used the formulation of a scaffolding, and indeed, he intended to write a book in fifty-three days, exactly the same amount of time that Stendhal had spent writing The Charterhouse of Parme. He regretfully failed. This would have been the ultimate vanishing structure. We can quantify any of the workings that preceded it, but there would be no mark of the system, no mark of the process at all.

Indeed, I prefer the slightly more perverse idea that Alfred Hitchcock speaks about when talking to [François] Truffaut about the MacGuffin supposedly the device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands; of course there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands. The very device that Hitchcock uses to enhance suspense, an item which

is of critical importance to the spectator, but no importance whatsoever for the scriptwriter. A red herring that would allow for increasing the suspense, yet should be discarded midway into the film once it had actually done what was needed. Indeed, in Psycho, midway into the film after forty-five minutes, Janet Leigh is murdered in the shower, leaving us with no protagonist. It’s only the moment that the film is about to begin that Hitchcock takes us from the shower scene outside onto the room to see the bank notes, as if the film was still about a girl who had stolen money from her boss. We know it’s not about that.

The implications for architecture, I think I will sketch out very briefly because on the one hand there’s no time, on the other it’s a slightly longer and more tedious argument to address in the manner of a lecture. I think the implications for architecture, particularly in terms of a structure that would vanish and leave no trace, we’ve tackled in a number of studios in the form of two issues, given the fact that in architecture as opposed to literature the problem is not a scarcity of constraints but actually an overabundance. One of the two realms in which the question of self-imposed constraint becomes relevant is in terms of rethinking what the brief is. The brief, which sometimes could actually be seen as potential, but it’s always dependent on the chance encounter between given constraints. These by and large become absolutely predictable and are archived together with a number of solutions, a “dictionary of received ideas” of sorts, where a number of given problems is always going hand in hand with a number of given solutions.

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As opposed to literature, where the self-imposed constraint becomes the main driving force of a production, the first place of architecture where this becomes of interest is one where you would still embrace the power of problem solving as a device, but you would actually be solving a problem that you don’t need. In other words, you incorporate a problem that simply destabilizes the balance of the given brief. That’s one aspect, one that would basically embrace a slightly more professional, cliché of embracing constraints. On one hand, you have the profession interpretation, that you have so many constraints that you simply meet them as a requirement without actually exploiting them. On the other you have the cliché of the academic attitude towards constraints, that basically constraints only harm your ability to be imaginative, and you’d therefore like to work in complete absence of constraints.

At the academic level I would say the main space of interest in relation to a constraint that could allow for opening up possible routes of design yet vanishing in the last place, actually the main issue in the beginning, is trying to raise questions about a number of design methodologies that are based on the inscription of a starting point or an origin, from parti to concept to diagram. Usually the trajectory is of defining a starting point at the outset, one that is inscribed and then leads gradually onto a project which in its becoming is validated and legitimized by the very inscription of an origin. This obviously excludes the possibility of acting within the territory of judgment. I think with this small comment I’m actually intersecting the question of the panel of

discernment. The question of a constraint that

vanishes, even though at the beginning it was an idea of trying to replace a starting point, is ultimately a question of working against a number of preconceptions that leads to the question of countering prevalent clichés in the work. Indeed, the next step of the project, which is currently being addressed as a long-term project of studios at Columbia, is called “The Dictionary of Received Ideas.” It’s a project that I started three years ago, that I claimed would last ten years, a project of charting the received ideas of ten years of architectural debate. The hero here is again a French writer, in this case Gustave Flaubert, his unfinished book The Dictionary of Received Ideas where he intended to inventory the clichés of late nineteenth century salons, which would allow for instant success in social life: an encyclopedia of stupidity, the things you would need to repeat in order to succeed.

We’re tackling the same project in the realm of architecture by looking at those formerly novel ideas that have basically been overused over a number of years and have become absolutely sterile. Just like Flaubert, we’re providing user’s manuals as to how you implement those received ideas. By the same token embracing them as a constraint that could actually lead to a different form of design beginning.

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Panel Discussion: Discrimination

Ana Miljacki, Moderator

Ana Miljacki (AM): It seems to me that all of your presentations have a relation-ship to time in a sense. I wonder when time intersects something like ugliness, does it really stay true, does the concept survive? Your talk, Timothy, sort of suggested that we start with ugliness and we end with ugliness. In Jeanne’s presentation, the notion of fore-casting as opposed to looking backward is an interesting one to me. In a way I’m not sure yet how ’82 intersected that idea of looking forward. For the constraints, I actually have a question again of how we engage this as a contemporary way of looking at architec-ture. I think it still needs to be teased out in the conversation.

For ugliness, a number of us looking at this building now might think it’s beautiful, even though you would like to convince us by the end that it is in fact ugly. Or still ugly. For me, I thought the moment the paper did something interesting was when it went to irritant and affects. Even then, I’m wonder-ing if there is a lifespan to affects or whether there’s a cultural timeline onto which they map.

Timothy Hyde (TH): For me, the tempo-ral dimension you’re referring to was the key thing. As I started to work on this, ugliness seemed to me to be a way of describing something that is only produced over time. The building wasn’t ugly when it was voted Britain’s ugliest building. If it was, what ugliness meant in that case was extremely narrow and not very useful. Similarly, people then thought it was beautiful too, and their opinion of its beauty was also too narrow and not very useful. Ugliness, the way I’m laying it out, is something that only exists as

a diachronic span. There’s not an increase or decrease in ugliness in any kind of precise way, and it probably does have a beginning or an end. Ugliness is only a useful concept or to me an interesting one when it’s describ-ing a compound of many things. The ugliness of the building only really occurred once the project of alteration commenced. That’s when it actually became ugly because then there was an identification of deficiencies, lacks and so on.

I would say ugliness is something purely temporal. It’s not ever synchronic. An ugli-ness that you would identify as a synchronic moment is a fairly useless one or it’s a single bandwidth, it doesn’t have the compound. I think the ugliness concept has other avenues for me, but one of the things that’s been interesting working on it is to describe a temporal condition, a temporal state in this broader way as opposed to identify-ing, as one would historically, these little momentary conditions. I think you’re on to something with a temporal cut.

AM: So we should keep going. With the Design Awards, since we are in a category of qualitative judgments, we never quite see what the criteria are, regardless of whether they are backward or forward. I guess back-ward or reactive as you call them is easier than projective. I’m still wondering what it would mean to give a projective guideline to this jury for the design awards.

Jeannie Kim: I don’t have an answer to that question, because there are so many built-in temporal delays even to the idea of having this accolade because of all the requirements. There has to be a certain

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body of work, there’s a delay built into the discipline anyway. For that built-in delay to trickle into the jury members who are all from other disciplines, there isn’t a moment where the awards can actually be predictive or projective. Obviously when you’re in that moment it’s difficult to recognize anyways. I think that in terms of the exhibition and the potential to end it is by saying that perhaps this is the end of the projective moment that we didn’t recognize in 1982. It’s a cop-out I recognize, but maybe it allows for the end of something and more attentiveness to what comes next. I don’t know if what you’re ask-ing is possible, but I’m also in it, so it’s hard for me to say.

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Lucia Allais (LA): I’d like to bring up that the temporal issue is also a technical issue, because with 1982, it occurs to me, that you’re showing things that were not designed, they would not have qualified for design. They’re synchronic with ugly skyscrapers, but they’re also very technical. All the stuff you showed for 1982 was, like, computers and coding and whatever, things that if designers would have been smart they would have used for design but they didn’t. In a way, the technical aspect is the one that can’t be seen in the present.

Similarly, the one part of the ugliness that I find can’t go away is the Brutalist concrete technique. That’s just what it looks like. The water is a really smart attempt, but in a way that’s never going to go away. At some point that’s going to stop being ugly and it’s just going to be a trope.

I also find that with all the techniques for moving and for creating, those are also very 1969. Say something about technique.

Jeffrey Kipnis (JK): When you answer her question, could you synthesize it for us?

TH: What emerges if you change the focus to technique as the question suggests… is that good, Jeff?

JK: This should be interesting for Enrique because he’s getting the opportunity to use an imposed arbitrary constraint.

Enrique Walker (EW): But it’s not too constraining, you’re giving me too much freedom.

TH: When you switch the valence over to technique, saying what’s being discerned here is a set of techniques, the question it foregrounds is that what’s being fashioned by any one of these judgments is a design of genres or a redesign of genres. I think of genres as the manifestation of techniques. Genres consist of a kind of assembly of techniques with a certain kind of hierarchies imposed on them such that they become internalized. This doesn’t apply to all disci-plines, but for those that have genres, that’s how it happens. So what could be produced out of something like the awards project

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is not a projection of trends, but a trans-formation from an existing known genre into another one. I was very struck by the categories that came and went, especially the American Original. There were only two years of that. It’s sort of like, “We’ll try that out as a genre,” but it didn’t work out so we’ll move to a different sort of framing.

It occurred to me also in Enrique’s be-cause of the clear focus on the novel and the film as the most advanced use of constraint among certain creative disciplines. Those are the two that have been able to produce such a precise sense of constraint. But is it also because those are disciplines in which genre is already foregrounded, so you can look at techniques and start to think about how you transfer one genre into its next evolution. I don’t know if it’s similar in architecture or not, but that would be my answer.

EW: The main question is one of mobiliz-ing the old and dismissed idea of problem solving, where you basically solve a problem of a different sort, allowing you to respond to the problem you really need to solve. Of course it’s an applied technique, because you’re giving yourself a MacGuffin, you’re devoting yourself to something that has nothing to do with what you really have to do, such that it illuminates what you really have to do. Of course there isn’t such a thing as what you really have to do, so you’ll probably still have to formulate it. It’s about mobilizing problem solving as a crucial part of the equation of design.

LA: Will any technique do for that?

EW: That’s actually what’s interesting about

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constraints. You have to meet the problem that you’ve given yourself to meet. It doesn’t matter how. In other words, in the end quan-tify whether it’s literary or not. The one I presented is in fact more interesting in my view because it has no positive quantifiable constraint, because that could only be mobi-lized toward said goal rather than towards a legitimizing origin. In other words, in one of the two you can actually be obedient with-out paying attention to whether what you’re actually producing is of interest or not.

JK: I have two questions. Is the novel with-out an e a good novel?

EW: I personally don’t like that novel. That would be my argument.

JK: Okay, good, because generally the critique of the pataphysical production is that by using, in some sense, the received body of evaluation, it’s always been consid-ered inert. When you reintroduce it—and I’m definitely in favor of the project of reintroducing it—the body of work you’re referring to is generally not considered suc-cessful simply because it’s inert, it’s evidence of its own process without occupying either the genre or a discipline’s conventions like in the novel.

EW: But I think that’s precisely the argument. I think that’s quite helpful as a question, because if we take, for instance, the problem of writing a novel without the letter e. If we ask everyone in the audience, some people may not be able to do it, some may be able to write the novel, some may be able to make something of interest. But

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basically there’s nothing in the constraint that would show the ultimate value of the piece.

JK: Let’s say I’m a chef, and I’ve decided to produce a menu where every item is going to start with the letter c: cucumbers, chicken, whatever. I can do that, and I might be able to do it less or more creatively, but the question is whether that contributes to the evolution and the promiscuous production of culinary effects—because I’m still tied to that discourse—or not. And I think that the criticism of having a cool method is that it’s never been able to equal the criticism of process. In the end, it’s never able to expand the repertoire of salient consequences.

EW: But the argument is that it could, but it’s not enough. You need to have, let’s say, a certain historical knowledge to see what the issues are you’re tackling, and to what end

you’re actually using or embracing that con-straint. The main argument—and this is why I was in favor of the vanishing structure—is that meeting the constraint in itself is not the deed. That’s simply the potential precondi-tion for opening up otherwise unexpected possibilities. But then you need to judge.

JK: But judge on what basis?

EW: On the basis of a different problem. You don’t judge whether it has a letter e or doesn’t, but you’re concerned about a certain problem of narrative that has noth-ing to do with that problem of including or excluding the letter e. It may be, let’s say, the structure of flashback, and perhaps by chance encounter the absence of the letter e because of a certain exclusion that was coming together with a certain existing structure of flashback would allow for something differ-

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ent. But then it’s always about the constraint together with an active exercise of judg-ment, which I think is what process usually precludes.

Only if you annihilate the origin can you afford to make an argument as to why the piece is valuable. In the case of Life: A User’s Manual, which in my view is a novel of a novel kind, let’s say, it’s unimportant, and you can’t quantify to what extent Perec used the structure or not. What matters is actually the outcome, because then the structure completely vanishes, as opposed to the novel without the letter e which is the one preced-ing that, that I would say is a slightly more conventional novel that simply gets to the acrobatic level of not using a high percentage of words in the French dictionary.

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of ugliness as a new critical criteria. You do a brilliant analysis of Southbank and all its features, but it was, first of all, not presented in the difference between ugly and beautiful, but an interesting performative outside the question of ugly and beautiful.

It’s only when the question of beauty comes back into the discourse that you reconstruct something that’s supposed to be interesting as opposed to ugly. All of that wonderful description of the little effects: the piling up of stuff, the way interiority and exteriority work, actually produces a rather rich critical criteria, but it seems to me that in the end what you’re trying to say is that the critical criteria is ugliness.

The other inconsistency is that Mark Cousins says in his article that ugliness can’t survive intimacy. Basically, once you get to know something in time, it’s no longer ugly. You seem to be arguing something different, that this is a building that’s become increas-ingly ugly over time through intimacy. It’s a really extraordinary reading I think, and I’m not quite sure what ugliness has to do with it.

TH: I’m not going to be able to parse all of those questions, but I’ll try some of them. I think that first of all the distinction from Mark is a key. Mark’s piece on ugliness really precipitated a lot of the thinking, but when he changes focus purely to subjectivity, to a question of the psychology of the experi-ence of ugliness, that’s an aspect of ugliness, but it’s not for me the whole thing. He’s still setting it up from the perspective of singular subjectivity and a particular experience, which is why he doesn’t go into affect and can’t really reach that as much. I think he’s

JK: Can I ask you a question, Ana? I can’t speak to Jeannie because they haven’t given a design award to Jessie Reiser and Nanako Unemoto. Three times they’ve been in it, and three times they’ve lost, so I just can’t speak to anybody from Cooper-Hewitt. But Timothy, I think you were onto something really interesting, and you make the same mistake that my friend Bob Somol tends to make, which is to make a brilliant argument through the ugliness, but you leave us with a sense that the position is the utilization

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talking about an emotion of ugliness and not an affect of ugliness.

For me, that’s a different kind of space. Maybe it’s that space between his argument and mine that changes the way we think of intimacy. I think intimacy is not something that necessarily dissolves ugliness because I’m not thinking of intimacy as the produc-tion of a single subjectivity. Maybe that’s where the distinction emerges.

For the other half of the question, for me this is a project of history. To make the distinction between Bob and me, I’m an historian and Bob is a theorist, as a starting point. What I mean by that is that I started this as a way to try and describe and work on Brutalism, to think of it over a larger span. It is really a descriptive project and an histori-cal project about Brutalism, and ugliness serves me as a concept for actually under-standing Brutalism as producing meaning over time, or as possibly a form of architec-ture that only accrues meanings that have been deferred or continue to be deferred. All that as opposed to recuperating Brutalism as a project of authorship and of tension, which the current writing on Brutalism is too much for my taste about presenting Brutalism as this moment of authenticity and the presen-tation of a kind of sincere thing. That’s why it doesn’t amount to or doesn’t sound like a

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critical posture that’s portable. For me it’s tied up with an historical work on Brutalism.

JK: It seems to me that what you had was absolutely brilliant, because it’s a recupera-tion of the lost possibility of a lost affirma-tive critical idea. Once you’ve done this, you can go back and look at architecture’s failure to irritate, and make judgments. Whether you’re doing this as a history of Brutalism or not, I think that was an original contribution to the discussion of criticism in a really pro-found way. It’s much more interesting to me, or much more effective as a tool for me as a critic than whether I read that through the discussion of ugliness. I think your job as an historian is essentially to do a kind of careful revision of how we think of some history, but out of that should come interesting things. Certainly in berating your panel I’ve become an unbelievable irritant.

DiscernmentPanel Number Three

This panel examined how the qualities of novelty, criteria without previous definition, can be made legible, or understood in relation to emerging conditions.

Disciplinary Kickbacks

Penelope Dean

I’d like to start today with a political analogy, one that I feel works very well for the state of architectural criticism today. This is an image of the Blagojevich impeachment trial at the Illinois Senate chamber in Springfield, Illinois. As we all know, the governor wasn’t there, he couldn’t bring in witnesses: he went on “The View” instead. When the House vote came down 144-1, Blago was out jogging in his Chicago neighborhood. The numbers reflected the outrage invoked by his alleged actions: racketeering, wire fraud, extortion, conspiracy, and for turning state government into what was later described as a certifiable freak show.

This is an image of the recent 97th ACSA National Conference [editor’s note: the same image] at the LEED Gold Certified School of Architecture at the University of Oregon in Portland, for which I’d had a paper accepted. Like Blago, I too wasn’t there, the panel moderator wouldn’t allow my colleague to read my paper: I was busy with my son, so I couldn’t take my case to “The View.” My ACSA paper, entitled “Environment by Design”—aspects of which I’ll be presenting today—was a piece of criticism concerning the state of architecture as it continues to be a target of environmental reform. Arguing that factions of architecture had de-disciplined into either specialization, the sustainable sub-culture where technology can apparently solve all problems—what the conventional wisdom of that ACSA panel seem to be promoting—or hybridization where absorbed by other practices, architecture is no longer considered enough on its own, the paper received the following peer-reviewed and no doubt LEED Certified comments: “nice, too

long, save paper.” If this constitutes the reception of

criticism by our primary professional association, clearly there is a need for developing (as did the embattled Illinois governor) alternative venues. More about those at the end. At this moment, and especially in terms of architecture’s relationship with environmental issues, there is need for another kind of criticism, one able to point out alternate paths for architecture to take. Instead of calling for a return to criticality to oppose such interactions or surrendering to the scientific market with project-less techniques, criticism could be more opportunistic in its efforts to advance architecture. Given this Illinois context, one could also understand it as criticism producing a kind of kickback for architecture.

If the Illinois Senate seat was Blago’s “valuable thing,” I would argue that architecture’s valuable thing is its discipline. By discipline I refer to architecture’s intellectual enterprise, its socio-cultural project, one that I believe is defined by the production of ideas and concepts. By ideas I don’t mean singular visions, but refer to those speculations, artificial constructs, and alternative worlds that are designed to exist alongside existing realities—a bit like the substitute realities of Blago as with his recent trip to Disney World the day his nineteen-count indictment was handed down. To my mind it is through the proliferation of ideas and concepts—which might take the form of buildings, drawings, models or texts—that architecture is able to distinguish itself from other design specializations in an inter-disciplinary context.

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I would also argue that it is precisely this mode of disciplinarity—that valuable thing—that has, in recent years, been given away, particularly in relation to environmental issues. Indeed, given the inflation of “green” in every conceivable architectural context, there is no other single issue for which architecture has “given it away for nothing” so readily. If architecture’s role used to lie in producing ideas and images of possible worlds for the environment during modernism (i.e., playing a prognostic role), in the context of more recent concerns, architecture has since been consumed by a larger design world that too often seeks to solve environmental problems (i.e., playing a reactive role). In this scenario, architecture is apparently able to fi x everything in direct proportion to its inability to think anything.

As a way out of this impasse, I’d like to propose using the green movement as a Trojan Horse to both recuperate a socio-cultural design project for architecture, and to smuggle back into the discipline those things that have been given away (and can no longer, it would seem, be presented up front). Like Blago, who was interested in that other kind of green, we need to determine what the movement is “good for.” In an age of consumer-driven environmental concerns, as evidenced across a range of products from organic groceries to recycled materials, the lay media from style magazines to TV documentaries, and A-list celebrity endorsements from Brad Pitt to Bono, it would seem that there are easy opportunities for architecture to capitalize on the movement’s pervasiveness for its discipline. In other words, instead of asking

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what can architecture do for green, it might be more productive to ask what green can do for architecture.

Two figures who have historically done just that are James Wines of SITE, Inc. and Argentinian architect Emilio Ambasz. While both have used architecture as a way of exploring a wide range of ideas in multiple design media from the 1970s onwards—from visual art to graphics, furniture and product design—it is their recent “cashing-in” on green by retroactively repackaging their earlier works that makes them interesting ambassadors here. By variously deploying landscape—understood here as plant life and earth forms—as a medium throughout their careers, both Wines and Ambasz suggest the beginnings of a possible socio-cultural, environmental trajectory as opposed to a narrowly technical or specialist one, despite their recent claims and self-revisions.

SITE’s Terrarium, Rainforest, and Forest BEST showrooms, designed between 1978 and 1980 are exemplary in their use of vegetation and soils, initially as mediums of environmental communication. In a literal and visual extension of the surrounding environment, the unrealized Terrarium Showroom (1978) for San Francisco proposed using a volume of earth “as the iconography of the finished building.” Wrapping a generic box in an earth sandwich approximating the actual strata of the area, landscape was deployed as both sign and symbol in Venturi and Scott-Brown’s “decorated shed” sense, the earth imagery communicating a live geological history. Similarly, the Rainforest Showroom in Miami, Florida (1978-1979), repackaged the

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natural environment of Florida by grafting landscape into a thickened, enclosed façade at the front of the store, creating another living iconography replete with vegetation and running water. In this case, the showroom was conceived as an extension of the surrounding landscape: the building no longer integrating nature but rather nature integrating building.

While the Terrarium and Rainforest showrooms deployed earth and vegetation as a kind of live wall appliqué, SITE’s Forest Showroom (1978-1980) in Richmond, Virginia assumes a slightly different role. Located in a suburban site where the building threatened to destroy existing trees, SITE allowed the forest to “actually penetrate and envelop the showroom” through fissures, “the trees invading its open cracks.” Here SITE conceives “nature” not as something re-sampled or cast as a sign, à la the decorated shed, but rather something to be preserved and to give the appearance of architecture being invaded and consumed by nature.

If these BEST stores, which SITE described as “environmental sponges,” reveal the investment in landscape to be both an extension of architecture and a medium of communication, the work of Ambasz, who

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having spent much of his career producing hyper-designed landscapes that integrate architecture, demonstrates landscape as a design medium through which to reinvent nature and artifice. Of particular interest is Ambasz’s “Green Town” proposal for Japan in 1992, because it captures so many of his earlier design concepts in one project. Asking the formal or perhaps graphic question “Why not green over grey?” Ambasz proposes a “soft over hard” (or vegetation over buildings) to go beyond “the house in the garden” to achieve “the house and the garden.” The Green Town is imagined to consist of the Nishiyachio Station (with its multi-tiered vertical gardens), the Fukuoka International Prefectural Hall building (whose terraced façades are festooned with gardens) and the interior winter garden atriums and below ground architecture of his Phoenix Museum of History. Here Ambasz seeks a new definition of man-made nature where garden and building combine “to return to the city the land it took away.” Of this collapse, Ambasz writes “[s]uch a definition would have to incorporate and expand not only on the creation of gardens and public spaces, but also on the creation of architecture, which must be seen as one specialized aspect of the making of man-made nature.”

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Perhaps Wines and Ambasz don’t realize how good they were back then. In a number of retroactive re-positionings, Wines resituated some of his BEST stores as examples of green architecture in his book entitled, unsurprisingly, Green Architecture, of 2000 and subsequent essays. While in 1980 he wrote of the Rainforest Showroom:

The entire façade of the [Rainforest Showroom] represents a microcosm of the surrounding landscape […] including water, vegetation, sand, earth, and rock […] The resulting effect is intended to function as a living iconography.

In 2005, he writes of the same showroom:

The building also represents an early use of vegetation and water as cooling elements in architecture, which led to SITE’s increasing commitment to green design.

This recasting of SITE’s projects at the service of the environment marks a shift from using landscape as a rhetorical device to a presumed performative one. And just as Wines recast his earlier projects in the context of green, so too did Ambasz, who retroactively declared in 2004:

I know it sounds presumptuous, but I lay claim to being the precursor of current architectural production concerned with environmental problems. […] To see Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando and many others utilize vegetal matter in their projects makes me feel my mission is beginning to bear fruit.

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This claim to be a forerunner, an originator even, suggests a shift in the understanding of landscape from a generative device of fantasy to an applied building system of efficiency.

If both Wines and Ambasz today seem sheepish about their earlier inventions amidst a current climate of fundamentalism, I would like to propose that there are other ways to unfold the significance of this work. Looking to interpretations of landscape in more recent architectural projects, it is possible to fabricate another disciplinary genealogy, indeed one architecture might just be able to cash in on an age of environmental concerns. From SITE, projects that repackage nature can be seen from Herzog & de Meuron to Atelier Bow Wow. From Ambasz a series of projects that collapse artifice and landscape can be seen in works by Martha Schwartz, Toyo Ito and UrbanLab.

Herzog & de Meuron’s Dominus Winery (1999), seems directly indebted to SITE’s Terrarium BEST Showroom. Adding to SITE’s repertoire of soils and vegetation, Herzog & de Meuron use rocks, and cage them in to produce a thin façade, the geological material enabling the building to disappear into its surrounding landscape.

Extending the possibilities for new attitudes towards visualizing the aesthetics of nature after SITE, Atelier Bow Wow’s “Void Metabolism” entry to the Great Pyramid Competition of 2007 in Dessau, Germany proposes an infra-ring of roads, and a promenade of leaf architectural typologies encircling a massive void containing a pyramid at its epicenter. The typologies take the symbolic form of extruded leaf

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motifs—graphic “ducks” in the Venturi/Scott-Brown sense—and deliver, in the words of Bow Wow, “a metaphor of the volumes” that compose Void Metabolism. In total, the clustered arrangement of leaves forms a linear city over time, which is connected to the pyramid via bifurcating tree paths whose geometry generates a variety of fields. According to Bow Wow, “produce from the fields can be used in the linear city restaurants, bakeries and flower shops, creating a partially self-sufficient microcosmic ecosystem.” While Atelier Bow Wow do not mention the term “green” anywhere in their project description, one cannot help but feel they surreptitiously cash-in on a sensibility of “green” via figurative graphic representation: color (exhausting the CMYK green palette), leaf outlines (a William Morris-like array of extruded motifs), geometric branches (tree paths) and agricultural textures (via a Photoshop cut-and-paste). Operating in the disciplinary realm of communication after SITE’s BEST Showrooms made explicit use of live vegetation and soils, Bow Wow’s Void Metabolism makes explicit use of symbolic motifs in an effort to architecturalize nature.

Martha Schwartz’s Splice Garden (1984)—which despite predating Ambasz’s Green Town project can be reread through Ambasz—for the roof of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conveys the sense of a garden through entirely artificial and abstract means. Collaging together two different kinds of gardens—on one side a French Renaissance garden, on the other a Japanese Zen garden—Schwartz reinvents the garden by saturating all surfaces with color, texture and

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volumes. In a literal extension of Ambasz’s later “green over the gray,” Schwartz wallpapers the enclosed roof interior with a “hard over the hard”—faux vegetation, plastic plants, dyed gravel, green paint and Astroturf over artifice—as opposed to Ambasz’s “soft over the hard.” Here the green roof takes on the identity of landscape reduced to décor, and the garden to interior decoration.

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Toyo Ito and Associates’ Park de la Gravia proposal for a thirty-nine hectare park in Vallecas Madrid, Spain (2003–) , offers an example of how the mechanics of water purification can lead to design innovation for a new concept of park. By way of a very beautiful “trees of water” proposal, Ito creates a variety of places within the park, an approach Ito claims is “identical to our thinking about architecture.” Reliant on techniques of recycling and waste processing, the project proposes two different kinds of artificial “watertree” landforms—Ridge Watertrees and Valley Watertrees—whose plan shapes acquire the imageability of a fractile tree-like geometry, and whose sections combine topography with water purification. Using the flow of water to generate a new formal vocabulary

for the ground, Ito manages to assert an architectural design sensibility that, as can be seen in the various physical and conceptual models, provides an idiosyncratic image that combines the abstract blue geometry of the water-trees with the organic lines of topography. As the project’s client Francisco Rubio remarked, it is “a park without architecture, but where the architecture is inside the landscape itself.” In many ways, it is the illicit appearance of architecture in this proposal that makes it so compelling. The hidden agenda, as Toyo Ito pointed out, was the necessity to rethink both architecture and the park after Modernism. He writes:

The public parks of twentieth century Modernism were laid out according to functional zoning. We can attest to the dull results in the parks of Tokyo suburbia, and architecture is conceived in exactly the same way. The dullness of architecture conceived on the concept of function is clearly visible. Can’t something be done to revitalize architecture and park?”

What Ito manages to do here is to not only reinvent the park, but to actually reclaim the park for architecture through a disciplinary re-colonizing of landscape.

If Ambasz’s Green Town suggests architecture and landscape as the planning units for a new form of city, UrbanLab’s Growing Water project for Chicago forecasted for 2106—the winning entry in the History Channel’s Future Cities competition (2006)—offers a way to rethink the landscape strip as a generative strategy for urbanism. Envisioning that Chicago could evolve into a model for growing water,

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principals Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen propose a series of Eco-Boulevards spread democratically throughout the city. These thin green bands, consisting of wetlands, forests, farms, gardens, recreation and public space are arrayed in parallel across Chicago’s entire metropolitan area with the graphic signature of the Dutch polder landscape. While much of the project is predicated on the recycling of water it’s the scale of the project that is of most interest here. Under the rubric of sustainability, the project smuggles in a socio-cultural agenda at the size of Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago, the desire being for comprehensive, democratic access to open space amenities across the city.

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Overlaying Chicago’s “emerald necklace” of parks and green boulevards first proposed in the nineteenth century within a new system of green bands, the project updates the nineteenth century urban vision of a park into a twenty-first century city-park network. Rethinking the bands as performative landscapes, UrbanLab’s Eco-Boulevards propose an implicit building and park agenda. What is ultimately being smuggled in here is the possibility for big ideas to re-enter architecture and urbanism,

and remain uncontested as they have up until now in Chicago, with Mayor Daly still keen to implement the proposal.

While by no means exhaustive, what this group of projects begins to point out is an alternative path that architecture might take when engaging the environment. Following on from SITE and Ambasz’s 1970s and ‘80s deployment of landscape under the disciplinary auspices of architecture, these later projects smuggle in, under the cover of green: repackaged nature (Herzog & de Meuron), symbolic aesthetics (Atelier Bow Wow), the artificial garden (Martha Schwarz), the park as architecture (Ito), and the big idea (Urban Lab).

* * *

Architecture should not be giving things away without getting something back. Criticism needs to reel projects back into the discipline. Criticism needs to go beyond diagnosis and point out new paths for architecture to take, and reroute what seem to be past dead ends. To my mind, criticism is actually a form of design whose medium is writing instead of drawing or modeling. As critics, we need to collect on debts; claim things for our discipline; demand kickbacks.

* * *

And now to be utterly opportunistic and to capitalize on the audience here today—even if this isn’t quite “The View”—I want to do a plug for a new architecture and design magazine of international criticism I’m launching with the generous support of the Graham Foundation. The magazine is my, and hopefully the discipline’s Letterman

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moment. Entitled Flat Out, and emanating from America’s Midwest, the magazine will drive theoretical speculation with the energizer of popular culture to accelerate the production of new concepts, projects, and design insights. As a supplement to existing American discourses (e.g. the West’s predilection for design technology or the East’s partiality for a historical/critical project) it is anticipated that a new geographical and intellectual middle will offer a more open receptivity to global design ambitions, and a vast and fast alternative to existing dialogues.

The editorial goals—the board includes John McMorrough, Bob Somol, Michael Speaks and myself—of Flat Out will be to pursue a disciplinary opportunism from the center of architecture. The magazine will speculate on how architecture might obtain

a degree of specificity while at the same time profit from its proximity to various design fields. Conceived as a speed sampling from selected European and American magazines, Flat Out aims for the design glamour of Italy’s Domus during the 1970s and ‘80s, the clarity of prose in America’s Spy magazine of the 1980s, the wit and humor of Britain’s Blueprint during the mid 1980s, and the deployment of archive in Germany’s Arch + during the 1990s. With a range of interviews, architectural criticism, essays and recurring columns, Flat Out is less interested in where architecture starts or stops, but more interested in identifying what its discipline can profit from, opportunistically and optimistically. I look forward to your contributions and subscriptions.

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Situated Technologies/Situating Concerns

Ariane Lourie Harrison

First of all I’d like to thank John. I’ve very grateful to be participating at a conference at what is a very early stage in my career as a critic, a lecturer and having started a practice two weeks ago. Mine is a very experimental talk that is going to gather certain of the themes that we’re developing this summer in a waterfront design project, but I thought I’d take the workshop framework that John proposed to present some current ideas. That will include my read on John’s conference last year, and I’ll also try to bring in some research interests I have , a very messy ex-, a very messy ex-ample of trying to integrate my dissertation ample of trying to integrate my dissertation with something resembling practice. with something resembling practice. I’d like to see if I can use these to develop a couple of topics that would engage the topic of novelty that was one of the premises of this session. I’ll do that looking at the work of two practices: The Living and R&Sie(n).

In attending the conference that John organized last year at Princeton I was struck by the very earnest tone of generational anx-iety that was implied in even the very terms of the title, “The Matter of Facts: Architec-ture and the Generation of Design Informa-tion.” What, in fact, was the matter with this generation that seeks to ally design and information against Architecture with a capi-tal ‘A’? The term generation highlighted the perceived need to distinguish oneself from one’s mentors, and Koolhaas figured very prominently among them. It also highlighted the need to locate alternatives to a practice in which the generation of form represented the critical evolution of the discipline.

This shift was largely reflected in the kind of interdisciplinary, and I would argue eminently pragmatic, approaches of these practices that offered local and self-critical

rather than grand or master narratives. They cast themselves as no longer communicating at the scale of the discipline but instead were aiming at a kind of local legibility, seemingly liberated from institutional representa-tive structures to engage shape, affect and performance. Indicating a shared skepticism of disciplinary fictions, such “Matter of Facts” described a grounded approach, accepting or manufacturing constraints in order (1) to produce—to produce a lot of buildings, pavilions; WorkAC discussed saying yes to anything—and (2) to design with a detec-tive-like scrutiny of facts, offering, like any good crime story a number of subplots.

Yet if smaller local narratives replace the grand narrative, it doesn’t remove the nagging sense that some narratives seem larger or more compelling than others. We’re all likely familiar at this point with Bruno Latour’s advocating matters of con-cern over matters of fact, whose purported objectivity seems to leave out half the story. The environment is obviously a matter of concern. Rising waters, et cetera are all part of our new geological age, the anthropo-cene, in which man (the anthro) is the most powerful natural force, enacting change in the environment. But, as the wry title of the work I’m showing here suggests (The Ocean is a Great Draftsman) ecological concerns need not preclude humor. This work was produced by the Harrison Studio, an earth artist’s design studio that was founded in the seventies and has a history of working with bureaucrats, scientists and architects. Today they are collaborating with David Turnbull and Jane Harrison from the firm ATOPIA.

ATOPIA’s Ecocivility project is one of the products of this collaboration. They are

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countering Britain’s rising waters with the heroic scale of the vertical agri-city—utopia plus sustainability equals megastructure. On a much smaller scale, WorkAC’s vertical city block called Locavore Fantasia, further suggests that another seventies motif, the oblique, could be productively interpolated with the refined appetites of the post-nature consumer. Such an embrace of the anthro-pocene undermines the hieratic and usually geometric boundaries that we see between man and nature. As Latour suggests in 1993 or Ledoux proposed in the 1770s, these are critical to the concept of modernity. The better that man can document his distance from the object of his scrutiny, the better his position to extract its value.

Ledoux’s scenario defines these clear roles for human and nature. He imagined the River Surveyor’s House well outside of Chaux’s enclosure at the very source of the Loire River, over the river in fact, so that the river rushes across the first story, but also so that you are facing the falls. Facing it so that its roar and spray would be a constant reminder of nature’s sublime scale. If Ledoux makes this kind of architectural experience out of nature’s transcendent force, its ideol-ogy is that of control via civil engineering. He adopts the oval overflow channel from

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bridges in a kind of Enlightenment “high tech.”

Here I want to turn to another modernist image of scientific authority—basically the only useful image out of my dissertation—an image that I’m suggesting emphasizes a kind of physical equilibrium, an image of flotation tests that were commis-sioned in the mid-1930s by the multinational firm Thonet. “We have here a photograph from the numerous underwater experiments which depicts our realizations regarding the fully relaxed body,” states the caption. Thirty-five subjects underwent testing at the Institute for Industrial Physiology in the institute’s flotation tanks. They are seen to come to a rest state, an equilibrium, in which the most common position involves a bend of the knee and at the waist. This is the image that Thonet decides in the image of scientifically verified comfort, the kind that will be offered by modern design.

But when I was looking at this image I felt that really we have to wonder about the comfort tested here, because the subject just does not look comfortable. Not at all. You see the subject stretching the tip of his nose trying desperately to breathe, his fists are clenched, this is not comfortable. This image of a scientific experiment makes us wonder what really was being tested? Perhaps it was really how to increase the salt concentrations to be able to produce this kind of image of physical equilibrium.

I’d like to argue that practices like R&Sie(n) and The Living grab onto what I’d like to call a “scientific outtake,” the comic potential inherent in the meeting of matter and hypothesis. This scientific test, which has a moral grounding for ecologically oriented

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architecture, I will argue is also a site for humor and a critique through humor, which is one of the strategies that enable you to re-main situated somewhere between the global perspective of the critical and the embedded participation of the activist.

To give you a bit of background on this image, it was likely produced ten years after the initial production of the iconic Chaise Lounge model by Le Corbusier’s collabora-tor Charlotte Perriand around 1927, the bet-ter which to sell them. These images and the scientific test were commissioned by Thonet, which as a global corporation, had salesmen in China and Africa by the 1870s, performed some of the first rollups of its competitors in the 1890s, very financially sophisticated. It’s a shadowy private holding company by 1920, yet remained pretty recognizable because of its strategy. Theirs was a strategy of mining the architectural avant-garde for new products, but it also included having

each architect become the public face of a local office that was run so independently that many consider Thonet to be French, while the Germans and Austrians consider Thonet to be their own. The company had a dispersed identity.

They used architects almost as trading cards to add a local touch to their firm, which I’m arguing uses images in a way as sophisticated as its use of financial structur-ing. By the time that the Nazi authorities figure out what this firm is doing, Thonet had moved its assets to Panama, its sales to New York City as Thonet Industries, suppliers to the United Nations, Harvard, MoMA, and any bistro seeking a European touch.

In the hands of Thonet, this image takes what I’m arguing is a predictably modern route. The body, trying to stay afloat, be-comes materialized into a diagram, which is then used as a logo. In this example, Thonet has two things, experimental results and an

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image, but the image is better. What the firm is doing is distinguishing the aesthetic from the function of science. This kind of image passes into modernist history as the embodi-ment of dynamic equilibrium, a harmonic or stable relationship between man and technology, which you may recall described in Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command. You could really chase it throughout history. I don’t want to do that. What I do want to point out is that this modernist image of physical equilibrium and scientific experi-mentation remains relatively current and it also remains allied to a series of design justi-fications. The aesthetic object can still speak to a kind of formal equilibrium between the body and landscape.

I’m setting this up against what I think may be its polar opposite, the work of a very young American firm called The Living. One of the ways they present their work is with very technical looking images that are being used to sell a project, to sell architecture. In their project River Glow, the scientific process is emphasized as a kind of hypothesis about obtaining real time data on water that is repeatable and has a logic of optimization—real time, real data, ASAP. The result of the experimentation is simply another step in the process. We can ask, what is that process for? On one level it presents itself as being very objective: this is an architecture that can make its own energy. In the case of a later work of theirs, Amphibious Architecture, the process is to make water and water qual-ity visible. This project was commissioned for Situated Technologies—which is what I’ve drawn on for the title of this talk—an exhi-bition which is trying to address an almost cybernetic city of feedback loops through

mobile phones, embedded chips, ubiquitous communication. This is all part of optimizing technologies that can be implanted or woven into building materials.

The Living is very clear in its presen-tation of problems. These are going to be framed as experiments which produce solu-tions that are all optimized using different technologies. They experiment with four forms of energy harvesting, develop proto-types in the bathtub—the bathtub is the new garage now that we are doing biotech—and all of this documentation is in fact going to justify a project called River Glow. It’s really an environmental installation that might have the potential for a certain kind of sensuality of experience, but the way they’re present-ing it has a rather neutral affect. They’re communicating that it’s scientific experi-mentation so it seems very objective. There is a question of to whom would this be communicating? That question seems to be addressed in a diagram.

When I saw this diagram at first I was perplexed, and now I’ve decided that it’s a very funny type of deadpan humor of the type I’m mining right here; looking for ways that scientific testing creates images that can be read in many different ways. I’m sug-gesting this kind of diagram is telling us that communication with a fish is just an arrow away! This kind of image may be addressing the kind of literal reproducibility of data on a cell phone, but it’s a communication that’s quite ambiguous, working several ways, and I like that ambiguity. I like the poten-tial for humor here. This kind of aesthetic subterfuge for the more mordant humor of one of their collaborators at the website Biotechhobbyist.com—for those who want

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to experiment in growing their own living tissue—by the artist Natalie Jaramijenko.

This is an artist who’s venturing into territory charted during the mid-80s by Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgs. These kind of human-machine mixtures, biotech hybrids, may be coming into architecture in different ways now. I’d suggest the cyborg metaphor appears, for example, in the work of the French practice R&Sie(n). In a work from 2002 called Hybrid Muscle, a combi-nation of biological and machinic power, they’re using what one could call cyborg ideas. I’m intrigued by the way they give this project a modest look, almost like a green vernacular building. That is, in some sense, what they’re proposing. The project is an art-ist’s pavilion in a very rural part of Northern Thailand, totally off the grid, so it’s also an ecological, energy-producing experiment

where the creature pulling is going to gener-ate enough energy to power light bulbs, cell phones, et cetera. This albino bison—they looked very hard for an albino—is lift-ing a metal plate which will descend very slowly converting into kinetic energy which is harvested by a mechanism that gener-ates electric energy stored in batteries for electric lighting. I’d suggest that this project’s hypothesis is not radically different than that proposed by The Living.

While an ecological engagement can be read in the tradition of sixties activism or modernist technological optimization, the architectural object is somewhat subordinate to the enactment of a scientific process; it’s really creating a machine that thematizes local conditions. Another part of the inter-disciplinary approach that John’s confer-ence last year highlighted, is the interaction

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with artists; film plays a large role here. The pavilion was also designed as a kind of stage set for a film by Phillippe Parreno called Boys from Mars. He turned to the architect to produce this more or less permanent stage set. The film is quite striking because you see these flickering lights on the movement of these panels, registering the slower rhythms of the tugging pack animal.

In another project the plant becomes almost that machine. The 2007 work Spider in the Wood is also documented in a film that demonstrates the recalcitrance or potential rebellion of the experiment. They’re play-ing on the inherent responsivity of mate-rial to time, to growth or to decay; mesh, plants, water all become characters that are endowed with an individuated intelligence and eventually encroach on the work or actually un-build it. The most architectural element here, the mesh, is tethered, as if to imply that which is most architectural is most susceptible to collapse. Again, they’re working with different scenarios, bringing in writers like Bruce Sterling, who writes script for the house, saying “the web house was all parabolic arcs and delirious sagging.” This tensile structure seems to reject some of the more colonizing approaches of the late sixties, a very different approach than the attempts to optimize a tensile structure. What R&Sie(n) is doing is documenting the responsiveness of materials over time, which I think is part of their strategy to thematize locality in physical material, hence firm principal François Roche describes “trying to make the context visible.”

But being situated in the local is not the same as being contextual. So to Kool-haas’ provocative statement “context stinks,”

we can almost imagine R&Sie(n) asking “like what?”’ The vantage point from which R&Sie(n) operates is neither externalized nor absorbed, but wielding organic decay against the rhetoric of sustainability. Maybe this is part of becoming politically situated, in a strategy that Felicity Scott describes as hinging on the need to distinguish the politics of ambiguity—the project or the character of the work—from a position of ambivalence. That’s the position of the author-architect.

It’s this kind of situated quality that I think could also describe some of the more local narrative strategies that we saw in some of the practices that John assembled last year. Spider in the Wood, to me, dialogues with a work like N architects’ 2006 Windshapes, two eight-meter high pavilions constructed using strings to register the gusts of the Provençal wind. They create a pavilion with a sound range from humming to whining in very strong winds. These winds are activating its strings so to speak in addition to registering an atmospheric condition. N architects state that “Windshapes allowed us to elaborate and test the idea of whether a building can respond to natural stimuli.”

The thing that I’m interested in, as a large category—this reference to the scientific test as the site for a certain kind of humor—I think we can see in a third, more recent project by R&Sie(n) called I’ve Heard About a Fat, Flat, Growing Urban Experiment. R&Sie(n)’s engagement with science, I would argue, is based very much on performance, a kind of enactment of science through machines by setting up a series of tests to see what the machine can or will do under specific conditions. In I’ve Heard About…, for

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example, they picked out a cement extruder and manipulated the properties of that machine, transforming a very linear logic of technological optimization into something that becomes almost a hydra-like animate machine. Their subversion of this machine by giving it this animate character is something that interests me, and it’s pretty effective. Similar to The Living’s premise of living buildings, they’re going to be producing im-ages of living machines so lamprey-like, this machine is fixing us in its eye or in its mouth as it takes aim.

This type of project is turning away from the more anthropocentric of sur-veillance machines, in which the human supervisor remains central, if only as phan-tom, in something like Diller + Scofidio’s Para-site. In R&Sie(n)’s plot, the machine is a character that will consume its own waste (old buildings) and secrete new ones. They do have some reference to nanotechnology intervening, a delightful blend of science fiction and actual technologies that I ap-preciate. R&Sie(n) seems to fully embrace the post-human possibilities of cyborgs in conceiving the building machine as a sentient one. Empathetic, their machines are recep-tive to the subjectivity of the residents, and thereby they introduce into the process of construction a constant state of negotiation.

The life-size prototype was not able to be realized following the techniques of the experiment. We get the picture, but the picture isn’t quite as compelling as the story. The realized product returns to almost cave-like tropes that are compulsory to ex-perimental works of the sixties as enamored with the self-organizing capacities of foam as R&Sie(n) seem to be with extruded cement.

Yet if this work titled A Fat, Flat, Growing Urban Experiment is an experiment in which the city grows itself, we could say it may be returning to a language of megastructure, and in that sense it might be worth noting here that François Roche is an architect who embraces the megastructural ambitions of his architectural parents. Roche describes “linked with Claude Parent and Yona Fried-man, I discovered these eliminated archi-tects, completely eliminated by history, in France and in Europe.”

Without going into detail about what was going on in Europe during the late sixties, the group Utopie denounced the megastructure for its necessary associa-tions with big capital, its appearance as a planning experiment linked to big science, and the sense that this was a very clumsy placeholder for the absence of utopia in a capitalist framework. I want to make refer-ence to that and to Friedman’s Ville Spatiale because I think that the critique of projects like the Ville Spatiale could be leveraged against firms like The Living—they’re too technological, too oriented on optimization, not architectural enough in form—but what I’ve tried to suggest is how certain of these megastructural ideas do seem to be quite resonant in current work, so perhaps we can look at some of this work, like The Living, work that I think has a very cool aesthetic, almost deadpan, in a way that’s appropriate to mining the objectivity that’s connoted by the scientific test.

I’m going to conclude with two im-ages that deal with water. On one side is R&Sie(n)’s Aqua Alta Two, and on the other The Living’s diagram of water quality. Both deal with how you can communicate water

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quality. In R&Sie(n)’s case, this work is linked to a larger architectural proposal, but what I want to emphasize here is a certain kind of didactic approach. They hand you a bottle of lagoon water. It has been filtered, desalinized, et cetera to public health re-quirements, but you, frail human, are going to drink it and be upset; you won’t like the way it smells, you won’t be able to get over your discomfort or aversion given its source. What they’re trying to do is take a very polemical approach to material, so that you deal with the materiality of this site. This water will still stink of its context to you.

The Living, again, takes a very different approach. I’m trying to emphasize the cool-ness, the potential absurdity or the serious-ness, probably both, of communicating with fish. I think this is an intriguing approach, being able to engage the language of science

and scientific tests within a discourse of ar-chitecture, dealing with an architecture that has ecological concerns. I’ll just conclude that I think the localness and the potential humor of the way these practices operate seems, to me, to be promising as a way to insert a critical capacity into technology to produce a kind of situated technology that’s dealing with current matters—matters of fact, matters of concern, and today matters of opinion.

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Adaptations: The Architectural Project in the Age of Postproduction

Ana Miljacki

Basically, what I’m going to show you and give you insight into is something that’s almost my subconscious. This is me trying to work stuff out. I’m going to use shorthand, and I’m going to pontificate and assert, but it’s basically a way to get through some stuff that I want to spend more time doing.

In the last few years, the critics in American architectural discourse—the ones I follow out of respect and habit—have generally stayed away from pointing fingers and naming names, or for that matter really clarifying, what might be at stake in the field for the young generation of architects that emerged on the scene during the last few years or, if you make it eight, the entire Bush era. The times were bad enough: Bush number two was in the White House, the country in two wars, but in retrospect the situation was downright cushy when it came to the day-to-day survival of architectural offices and the commissions to feed them; the rigged economy thankfully required many architectural services. Architects were encouraged to just go for it, make the best of their commissions as they came, worry less and say yes. They were asked to work as double agents who might find ways of slip-ping in some resistance to the status quo, or at least a way to advocate for outcomes they think necessary, while simultaneously taking care of their commissions. Certain theorists even had a sense that something like a new form of emancipatory project would appear sooner or later, even if in an unimaginable and yet unrecognizable form. But what if it does not? Or, conversely, what if critics are not looking closely enough to recognize it?

For some young American architects, just as for some critics, the collapse of the

market may have produced internal dialogues that in many ways resemble the Greenspan congressional testimony in October of last year. And even if it instigated deep introspec-tion, the collapse of the market itself will not help us decide for sure what was at stake for the young generation of American architects over the last eight years or might be in the future, while it might in fact wipe out some of them. All this is to say that this is a rather rough and problematic first attempt at get-ting closer to issues, or a way of identifying issues, to which and through which the new work speaks.

In 2003, Bruno Latour invited his read-ers to take a mental test: if we thought that indeed a time would come that we would be able to distinguish ends from means, facts from values, humans from non-humans, trusting that clarity was merely a question of progress, we could still consider ourselves modern. If we hesitated at all with this prob-lem, Latour called us postmodern. If, on the other hand, we believe the world is getting ever-more entangled, we might have entered another paradigm, one that Latour insists on calling non-modern. In my opinion, we don’t need to give up the fact that modernism, or postmodernism for that matter—as a period with a specific ethos, concept of time, and a specific idea of progress—actually occurred and produced results, in order to accept the idea that we are now able to see and describe complex relationships between various agents, objects, histories and processes.

A type of periodization is important here to complement Latour’s experiment. Even if we lack a convenient name for the contemporary, terms such as Marc Auge’s supermodernity, Hans Ibeling’s supermod-

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ernism, Zigmund Bauman’s fluid modernity, or even Latour’s own non-modernity, have all resulted from a description of an impor-tant difference between the contemporary and the modern as understood historically. If modernism can be seen, following Bauman’s description of solid modernity, as having operated with the idea that progress and the era of time would eventually deliver things to perfection or to a perfectly rationally organized world, in distinction to modern-ism, the general consensus is that today we can no longer tap into the authority and certainty of that project. But for a genera-tion of architects and clients who grew up with sampling, networks fully internalized, lisp protocols, knowing about the genome, contributing and learning from Wikipedia, donating money to and SMSing with the Obama campaign, having a set of external authoritative truths is not a precondi-tion for action. Still, in order to intervene consciously or even semi-consciously in the world, as architects ultimately do, requires the production of personal and/or collective narratives that in some way mediate between the circumstances exterior to any given proj-ect and the design process itself.

These narratives function as positioning devices postulating the role of the architect and of the discipline of architecture in a complexly entangled world. Our world. Le-gitimating narratives are part of the history of architecture, both as entire authoritative discourses (on style, origins, social respon-sibility) or disciplinary projects (autonomy, New Brutalism, neorationalism) and as individual architects’ interpretations of those discourses. What distinguishes our most re-cent versions of legitimating narratives from

all earlier versions in architectural history—as some of you have already mentioned—is that narratives of architectural production are now more fluid, more personal, often multiple, generally ideologically modest, and that they are often adaptations of parts or a number of earlier stories. All legitimating narratives that we might be able to recon-struct, from ’68 or earlier, until recently, could be organized in three groups, three fundamentally different genres or postures: narratives of activism, narratives of new beginnings, and narratives of optimization.

Narratives of activism rely on the most direct form of participating in politics. Proj-ects in this genre use aspects of the architec-tural medium in order to reach the citizen in their audience. They have agitational aspirations and a less immediate concern for building. I’m just going to give you a few historical examples for each of these narratives just to sort of hold it in your head, more or less the way I think young architects these days hold them in their head as a kind of mythical background. So for narratives of activism we have Ant Farm, or, for example, Diller + Scofidio.

Narratives of new beginnings may sound like proposals of utopian worlds—and certain utopias may fit here as well—as these narratives are actually simulations of architectural desert islands. What would you take with you in order to make architecture in the condition of a desert island or in isola-tion? What are the minimum ingredients an architect needs, or wants, in order to make architecture? A number of different takes on autonomy fall into this bracket, although autonomy does not map perfectly onto this genre alone. At stake here is the transforma-

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tion of the definition of the disciplinary core, different mythologies of the architectural origins and the possibility to rearticulate or re-imagine the contemporary subject of architecture from scratch.

Finally, we have narratives of optimiza-tion. Although the ultimate effect of work in this genre is a kind of optimization of circumstances, more important than the idea of optimizing here is the fact that the ideo-logical role of architecture here is conceived in relationship to an assessment of the world that architecture is seen as a part of. Projects in this vein accept constraints from the world and work within those. We often find examples in this genre of a kind of delirium of trying to explain the world.

In order to begin the work of discern-ing, as the panel suggests, exactly what we should hold this generation of architects accountable for, I will look at the work of three firms, each very loosely fitting within each of the three narratives. They fit loosely because contemporary narratives are adapta-tions, they’re not clearly adhering to these narratives anymore.

The urban design firm from Brooklyn, Interboro Partners, acts as the new activ-ists. By choice and by inheritance, WorkAC is a firm that emphasizes its interest in the real world; its pragmatism places it within this narrative of optimization. There could be many projects within these narratives, as well as within new beginnings, but few are as compelling as MOS, and Michael Mer-edith’s studio at Harvard last fall linked the notion of the desert island to the temporality of the historical avant-garde, asking students explicitly to simulate new beginnings. This is partly where the name comes from for

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me. A part of his blurb to his students said, “What is it that we can be naively optimistic about today? Advanced architecture simply claims that if you are clever, given the appro-priate sources, technologies and methods, the right compromises can be made. How unsatisfying. Therefore we’re faced with a twofold question: whether revolution is still possible, and if so, what will it look like? In other words, what will we take with us to our desert island?

Now to show you the firms. Interboro, in their Dead Malls competition entry, a competition organized by the LA Forum in 2003—a project that started the public career of the partnership of several Harvard graduates—articulates the role of the archi-tect as that of the ghostwriter for a series of constituents, individuals, and other more ab-stract entities that have interest in this mall. Basically, they look at the mall and say that it is generally understood as dead, but there are cultures around it that seem to be still living and using the mall, and we’re going to advocate for those cultures whether they be a snake society, a pickle guy or so forth.

In another project by Interboro, one for lots in Detroit, they similarly ghostwrite for basically the entire neighborhood a story about what one could do here or what is already happening, processes they might in some way want to continue, instigate or help. They always start with a personal nar-rative and come back with material for the neighborhood, so dissemination and personal contact are part of their project.

To their own desert island, MOS brings parametric design, two strong and consis-tent formal researches or obsessions (one is a stack or a funky stack, and the other

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a horizontal tubular volume), and much more. In fact, upon inspection, their list of concerns includes everything. This is what they’ll say—I’m using architects’ own texts here because part of what I’m trying to do is trying to discern between their work and their texts what kind of narrative they’re constructing for themselves, how are they legitimating their work—

Through our work we engage architecture as an open system of interrelated issues, ranging from architectural typology, digital method-ology, sustainability, structure, fabrication, materiality, tactility and use, as well as larger networks of social, cultural and environmen-tal. This process of participation and radical inclusion allows MOS to operate producing and inflecting environments at a multiplicity of scales.

Everything, of course, would be useful to have on a desert island, but it calls into question that initial premise of self-con-straining.

WorkAC, in a similar type of text, says that they are “shaping ideas, inspired by difference and applying research, program-matic expansion, a surrealist’s eye,” et cetera. “They embrace humor, their work strives

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to make one plus one equal three,” and so forth. The statement they make follows the rhetorical rules of the genre, it tells us that WorkAC is pragmatic, oriented towards the world and therefore the constraints for the practice come from the world; they have tools to resist taking themselves seriously. The goal seems to be adding value to public life. Finally, the mode of engagement is a network team. Not one of their statements transcends the collection of statements, so even when they claim to be producing alternative universes, the posture of that utterance suggests that universe-making is a modest and perfectly reasonable goal.

But perhaps even more importantly, it is the plurality of those alternatives that make the proposal seem modest; there are many options, and many routes to those options. This evidence of uncertainty in some way automatically exposes the entire statement as a logistical blueprint for the practice and not an ideological one in terms of particular content or politics of the worlds they are committed to producing. Simultaneously, in the production of this blueprint—a kind of ingredient list for a recipe, not a recipe itself—is articulated a kind of contempo-rary version of the role of the architect. It is expressed as a series, not as a constellation of logically interconnected or conditionally related elements. Therefore, a number of different mixtures of humor, public gain and historically grounded disciplinary research, as they say, should be possible and produced in WorkAC’s work. In the end, the particular mixture of these ingredients is only partly determined by the world, as it is precisely the flavor of any given mixture that is tacti-cally determined by the team of architects,

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but we never quite know to what end.In order to really try to decipher how

they work, or in order to constrain what I have, I wanted to ask these firms three questions: (1) How do they understand the architectural object, or what is the idea of the architectural object and its performance in their narrative? (2) What is the historical or temporal imagination that they employ? (3) Is there a trick that might come out that might be theirs alone in this process?

Interboro, in no other project than the Dead Malls competition entry, more clearly explains that they’re interested in advocating for agents and entities of all sorts simulta-neously. These agents all share the mall as a concern, the mall constitutes them as a public in a way, and Interboro sees their role as that of observing this situation through an oligopticon, an all-encompassing lens that will allow them to describe the relationships between agents, agencies and architecture more thickly. If this oligopticon smells a little bit of rightiousness, you would not be wrong. This firm revels self-assuredly in bottom-up visioneering or envisioneering.

For MOS, it is their radically inclusive, multivalent object of architecture that per-forms connections relationally. Its aesthetic qualities are actually at stake here. Almost every single object they make—whether of the stack or tube variety or something in between that their Ordos project represents, or their stools or their shades—has been carefully crafted into an elusive, precisely indeterminate form, as Mark Goulthorpe might call it. There is even an acceptance or an embrace of an image of material failure which involves or produces an uncertainty in the audience. Maybe it’s a kind of irritant.

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They will claim that what interests them about the parametric project is exactly what it exceeds: the sociopolitical dimension of architecture. “Parametrics’ potential is to produce a hyper-inclusive set of parameters and relationships. The more multivalent the object, the more meaningful and complex it is. The more multivalent the object, the more engaged it is in culture, market and the more elusive it is to being absorbed by it.” This claim of course is subject to clarifica-tion. What interests me more than whether it is true or not—because we’re dealing with a legitimating narrative here—is that parametric production in general, and their formal research, are understood by MOS as directly participating in producing sociopo-litical relationships.

Both MOS and Interboro - in entirely different ways - are interested in a type of a relational object, a “quasi object.” For me, still the most important description of what that is comes from the definer of the quasi-object Michel Serres, who asks us to conjure up an image of the soccer game in which the soccer ball is that kind of a quasi-object. It doesn’t really exist as an object unless it is being played by the team. It is in fact, that the team shares a set of concerns about scoring and relaying the ball that the

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ball somehow produces the team around it. In that sense, both the architectural object in both Interboro and MOS is asked to produce that kind of a set of relationships between people who participate in the production of the thing, but also between those who are receiving it aesthetically.

The concept of time in each of these projects is in large part what defines their, or for that matter my, ability to put them in any particular place in the matrix. The temporal element determines the genre of the narra-tive to a large extent. Interboro’s activism is projective. It sets out to accomplish things for the future, and it is relatively straight-forward in that sense. It always starts with a narrative of the present.

The new beginning narrative operates on an avant-garde time, a deliberate turn-ing back to an era, but in MOS’ case, this happens with a twist, provided by notions

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like a “Prehistoric Future”—which is what they called their middle PS1 scheme—and an appeal to an archaic shape or form in “After Party.” For me, this suggests a slightly different way of being in time. It’s not just that they are standing with their backs to an era trying to upstage it, it is more like “project time,” something that Slavoj Zizek talks about in his In Defense of Lost Causes.One stands in a kind of history of the future in order to make that future happen. For example, the way that Zizek would explain both the arrival of communism and its fall is that there was the idea that there is a crisis coming for sure, and we are in its past. We have to act in its past in order to stop it in its future.

In WorkAC’s case, the temporal aspect of their intellectual project changes from project to project in a way. The shuffle of historical references or the attitude towards

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history as a repository of architectural knowledge is nowhere more evident than in the “Program Primer” that WorkAC produced for Praxis. It places side-by-side examples from their own work, from the annals of architectural history, next to their friends and their mentor. The particular context and content of each of the projects they look at is eliminated. We have a kind of synchronal collapse of the archive.

What I think has to strike one when looking at the Beirut project produced by WorkAC for the Rotterdam Biennale in 2007 is that the delirium of saccharine and cute colors of the model, and the super-saturated atmospherics of the renderings disquise a dark and twisted conceptual proj-ect on the interior. They are basically saying, “We’re going to accept the fate of Beirut as a war zone, and give you a series of epochs that it could go through.” These are the tent city, urban war coliseum, metro, bunker archaeology, cedar evolution and then iconic programs. This sci-fi history of a tortured city does not visually conjure up the parallel that I’m going to make, fairly obviously, to The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. Nothing about the architectural elements in the two projects can be compared, but the narrative structure, the use of the present tense in both, and the effect of outrageousness are important in both projects. The allotments in Koolhaas are spatial, while the epochs in the Beirut project are temporal.

Whether specifically articulated by Work or not, the split between, or perhaps the forcing together, of the happy graphic and desperate story point to a crack in the constructed veneer of innocence. The pro-gram for the project meanders through a se-

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ries of architectural headings, from primitive tents to bunker archaeology to tourism, and to the iconic programs or buildings that will look like anything from Gehry to Koolhaas, WorkAC to Jurgen Mayer. The story that they tell is tough and silly simultaneously, a real mash-up, a kind of “Girl Talk archi-tecture” that resolves in the candy colored masterplan.

However earnest projects like Public Farm 1 or the Ordos House may seem, once it is plausible that WorkAC’s innocence is faint—that it is their best-kept secret that they protect in every interview they give, one that they might not even know that they’re protecting—it is easy to see PF1 as an earnestly presented joke, and the Ordos House as a house for collective living, be-cause they’re not taking it as lightly as they want us to take it. They are preparing it for a context of several families living in it even though they will not at any point critique the commission. PF1 certainly plays with the reference to a particular New York City type of nostalgia for one’s own private tomato garden, and when employed as a roof and a shape for PF1 it may indeed serve to some-how brand the idea of an ecological urban-ism that they otherwise talk about, however

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far from the ecological urbanism that they’re talking about this earth-filled cardboard box may be.

The fact that the temporal structure or the temporal thrust of WorkAC’s projects can change as dramatically as it does, from a retail store for here and now to a radical synchronal mixture of history, to utopia, and back to cartoony projection, signals the extent to which the historical time itself is amiss in this work. We don’t get a standard time frame like we might otherwise get in this lineage of pragmatism. We get something much weirder than that.

When it comes to the tricks that these firms employ, Interboro employs what they call ghostwriting and they do that knowingly, but in addition, not an innocence but an acceptance of their bottom-up approach as inevitable for them. When we look at MOS, there is an uncertainty that they embrace

and channel into the very shape of the work. In may be a kind of constructed uncertainty that they’re interested in, but it is certainly one of the tricks that allows them to do the work that they’re doing. In the case of WorkAC, they may want us to think it is humor that helps them do work, but actually a kind of faint innocence is much more what is at work here.

So what do we do with all of this? I don’t yet know really, but I think that scratching the surface a bit more deeply and in a more organized way than I just did for you today might a generational set of concerns beneath their anxiety to articu-late projects. In that sense they might stop looking like zombies, even though they might look like very different people who participate in a kind of generation of young architects.

Panel Discussion: Discernment

John McMorrough, Moderator

John McMorrough (JM): I want to make my apologies to my fellow moderators. I think I gave you a difficult task in synthe-sizing material that was interesting in its own quality, but clearly wasn’t thematically related. I’ve now afforded myself the oppor-tunity to have challenging presentations that are utterly entwined, so good for me.

That said, we could really just have a conversation about this material. In a way, I was intrigued by the parallels in the first two presentations. They’re making different sorts of claims, but both of them seemed to be dealing somehow with the specter of environmentalism, in the widest sense of the term. What struck me in both cases today was the sense of real skepticism about any sort of hint of instrumentality. In Penelope’s case, she was talking about green agendas, and architecture’s disciplinarity giving over different sorts of traits, looking at a set of practices that come back with a rereading of material to get new insight into recent work. I’d say its concerned with the image, and the imageability of nature as an adequate and appropriate vehicle for architectural exploration. And Ariane, in your case, I think it’s a similar sort of operation, but it’s not so much about environmentalism, instead a sort of pushing of science and scientific method. You could refer to it as objectivity. It’s almost an aesthetics of objectivity.

What I’m intrigued with in both cases is, given the situation of the work, that in both cases there’s a sort of skepticism of the instrumental and an investment in the repre-sentation. Is that a fair identification, or am I missing the nuance of the descriptions?

Penelope Dean (PD): First of all, I would say that the Ito project is not interest-ed in image first. It’s actually a really techni-cal project about the recycling of water, but it’s done in an interesting way that produces a good image, and I think a very beautiful project. For sure it’s the case with Atelier Bow Wow and the extruded leaves, that’s definitely operating in the realm of image.

To get back to the first point of your question about skepticism, yes, I’m really skeptical. I should have sort of prefaced this by saying that I’m operating in Chicago now, where it’s epidemic. Every single discussion is about how to turn Chicago into a green city, “We have to have green roofs, we have to do this, and this,” et cetera. It’s gotten so bad that architecture has just been reduced to a kind of techno-specialization where technology is simply slapped on the sides of buildings. My position is that that way of dealing with technology is inadequate. So yes, I’m really skeptical of that project.

The projects that I included were just ones that I saw as rewriting the green trajectory. I think we need to simply open up the possibilities. That’s not to preclude the technological project; I actually think that if you went back to [Reyner] Banham’s Well-Tempered Environment, what we have to do is to reclaim that territory. No one has reclaimed that territory the way he wanted. Maybe the projects that Ariane brought are attempts to do that. I think what happened is that project became a High Tech one through the British scene and Ken Yeang, who though operating in Malaysia is British educated, and then it kind of appears in people like [Wil-liam] McDonough here.

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Ariane Lourie Harrison (ALH): I think bringing up Banham’s Well-Tempered Environment is really a perfect jumping off point because I think he is trying to ask why do things that work have no look? Where is the look? What’s the problem here? I think that when Ana was framing them in the guise of activism, that in some sense dispenses with the responsibility to have a look. I’m really interested in the question, can things really have no look, and what about that look of technology that thinks it is absolved of a look, yet there are many moments where there are potentials for an aesthetic. A firm like The Living pretty much denies that responsibility I think.

Ana Mijacki (AM): Don’t you think that their look is the lack of look?

ALH: I think that’s fascinating and impor-tant. It’s important to be able to read them in a certain continuum, to not say that no, these are just another set of technical experts, à la the ones that Banham makes reference to.

JM: That’s interesting, and I think it brings me to Ana. I was utterly fascinated by the taxonomy, I think it works very well and is very illuminating for my own work and for the discussion at hand. I was curious that as you went through and gave us the tricks, and the time and so on I noticed that at a certain point it was really a study of rhetoric as opposed to a study of form or of instrumen-tality. You were very pointed in calling them legitimizations. It’s clearly important work, but I’m curious how you see legitimacy as a representation of the architect, and why

you feel that at this juncture that work is the work of criticism as opposed to dealing with the forms. You spoke to the forms to a degree, but really only as the scaffolds of the rhetoric.

AM: For me, the important thing right now is to figure out what is it they tell themselves at their desk when they make this stuff. I do think that some of that text or rhetoric is not actually always articulated. It’s sometimes in the form itself, but you only got a little bit of that. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way we can actually pit them against each other, and are there going to be certain things that emerge if we let what they’re saying turn into a kind of story about the project. Gen-erally, when asked a straight question, this entire generation says they have no project, they’re just doing stuff. In a way, I’m trying to see what’s actually behind that kind of anxiety to articulate. They’re still articulat-ing it, just not when you ask them.

ALH: But is it necessarily an anxiety or could it be a strategy, that they prefer not to discuss their project? Do you have to be that overt in discussing it? I’m referring to the example of The Living, who have an overt ecological project which I feel they manage

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to subvert in certain ways. If you would ask them about speaking to fish I’m not sure how they would answer that question. Do you have to be straightforward, or can you prefer not to respond?

AM: Yes, you can, but for me there’s some-thing at stake here. There’s a generation that has actually produced a different way of legitimating what they do, to themselves, whether they say it or not. Those narra-tives are not the three that I gave, I used those to bracket them. But they’re actually doing something else. What I’m hoping is that by looking at a series of things in those narratives—because they already accept something about the cliché—by looking more closely, we might find that actually they’re all trying to talk about some kind of relational aesthetic, but they’re not all going to say it. When it comes to the things that matter to them, they’re scared of actually articulating it.

PD: I wonder if it’s simply a deferral of expertise. I’m done with ACSA Conferences, but I was at the regional one in November for the Midwest on digital stuff, I was asked to moderate something. There were three guys, boys, showing images of CNC routed toolpaths moving, and very beautiful objects they were making. Then when you asked a question about that work there’s a kind of hands-off approach, like “Whoa, that’s not my job to explain what I do.” I do think that there’s what’s best described as a deferral of expertise, or not wanting to be accountable for the work.

JM: That deferral of expertise is quite interesting in the terms of this conference because the question becomes whose exper-tise? What is that purview? In your approach, Ana, you’re trying to force them to explicate something that is either overtly hidden by strategy or also, I think, unsayable because they don’t construct the problem that way. I wonder if this is the intellectual division of labor where the role of criticism is to help articulate larger fields. It’s interesting that you’ve talked about the work of these three groups, who for me are somewhat formed or forming along their way. It seems like your constituency really isn’t these architects, but students and the way they start to under-stand the nature of the culture.

From my understanding, groups like these have been utterly formed by a theoreti-cal discourse simply through their teachers living through it. It’s been ingrained. Now this group becomes the teachers, and there seems to be no ideology in terms of the pedagogy. Then it becomes an issue.

AM: For me, the interest in this comes from the pedagogical side of my life. That’s defi-nitely true, but I also think criticism, really specific criticism, has not been happening for

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these architects. I’m not saying that this little thing would actually be useful for them, but I think somebody has to be there to say, “Look, are you kidding me?”

JM: This brings up the subtext of the conference, because we’re all of basically the same age, we’ve all graduated from doctoral programs in the last couple of years. For me, one of the questions is that, though this conference is purportedly about criticism, it’s really about what the nature of intellec-tual production is for people trained to think about architecture. It’s manifested in differ-ent ways today, some more overtly histori-cal, some theoretical, some sort of critical in a way. When you talk about how somebody needs to come forward, I don’t think it’s a person, I’m wondering if it’s a position. Is there a subject position, the critic, as some-thing that takes on certain roles. Now there’s a certain pregnancy to that question because there are generations whose mode of operation don’t imply process, don’t imply method, don’t imply dogma in the same way in terms of their iterability or at least their speaking about it in a forthright manner. That might create this division of labor model. Is this something interesting or is it something to be avoided?

The previous generation constructed their intellectual project about precisely not doing that thing, and that’s the precipice I see us approaching. We’re also formed by a previous generation that had certain sorts of theoretical conceits, one of them having to do with a lack of operativity, and also the notion of theory in terms of making design propositions. I think in some ways some of us in this panel especially are starting to navigate that terrain. For me this is a mo-ment of calling attention to that fact that we are precisely doing all those things that the generation before and the generation before that were told, “Do not do this thing.” I just want to bring attention to that moment.

PD: But I do think the role of the critic is to reel things back into the discipline. In a way, we need to point out directions and have po-sitions. It’s those positions which are going to enable you to choose this project versus that project, what’s in, what’s out, is it good is it bad. Otherwise we’re operating a little bit in a vacuum.

ALH: But when we mean to bring things in relation to the discipline, we are also remak-ing the discipline constantly, and I think that that’s where some of the very interest-ing work of the seventies happened. There were moments of active suppression. I don’t know very much about the Utopie situation, but it’s very interesting to have an avant-garde actively suppress another in repeated instances. Maybe that is also where some of the more historical work begins to elaborate the discipline and to also—and I think this is critical—is to elaborate the discipline as other than a conversation between archi-

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tects, to really look at these conversations, these strategies of working with institutions. My interest was in how a certain type of corporation maneuvers, but there is a tre-mendous amount of work to be done in legal frameworks, financial frameworks, et cetera to keep expanding the discipline as critics bring work back into relationship with it.

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JM: I think that’s a good point. I was struck by just how many of the presentations had a kind of underlying formula: a rereading of the sixties and seventies, then a jump into the current moment as a recurrence and how to deal with that legacy or transpose it. Whether it’s environmentalism, the me-gastructure, brutalism, et cetera. That’s not causal, but I think it’s interesting that we’re in this moment of reoccurrence for lots of factors. Cyclical history, economic crisis, all of these situations where we’re going to face these things again.

I’d like to expand things a little bit. I’m not going to convene the whole table, but to open it up to the floor and also to the other participants to make comments about these presentations but also the presentations throughout the day if there’s any dying need for a summary comment or observation.

R.E. Somol (RS): Since Jeff [Kipnis] is gone, I’ll take his normal place and provoke. There is a generational jest that you’ve taunted us with, that somehow the genera-tion before you wasn’t able to do things that you are now able to do. What is the unable, and what is the able, particularly in relation to Jeff’s question about history, theory and criticism? As you said, everyone here is the product of a Ph.D program, and Ph.D pro-grams are very good at teaching history and theory, but not so good at teaching criticism. So how do you overcome your own baggage, in terms of a Ph.D, in order to do criticism? And have you overcome the baggage of his-tory and theory in order to do criticism?

JM: You convene a conference in the hinter-lands, invite your closest friends, force your students to come, and try to work it out…

I think it’s a perfectly valid question, and I don’t think everybody’s on the same line of that issue.

RS: How are you not the anti-shop guys, which is another form of specialization, and so in some sense, a bit less than the genera-tion of amateurs that we see in the field right now? As in those who only care about what it is and not its significance, versus others who might care about its significance but not what it looks like. Is there a mirror inad-equacy in expertise and specialization, the illness for which criticism is the cure?

Lucia Allais (LA): I disagree. I don’t care much for the generational question. I think if this is the conference, the three panels were:

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criticism as informed by description, criti-cism as informed by discrimination and criti-cism as informed by discernment. But if you actually pay attention, we really tossed the models so that our panel was very discern-ing, about making judgments about what’s worthwhile writing, and the second panel was actually very descriptive, they spent like a whole hour on one building. I don’t know how the last panel fits in that, but it seems like discernment is revealing what was hid-den, actually they described what was obvi-ous, but just in really scientific terms.

So I’m thinking that a criticism of what’s happened today is that we’ve made more leeway for criticism. Criticism hasn’t disappeared at all, on the contrary. For me it’s pure opportunity, not repression.

DISCUSSION

JM: I will say one thing though about the generational construct, that it’s used with some light irony as an inherited form of talking about the passage of time and years. I would also adamantly say that the position-ing, especially at this juncture, isn’t the fact that there was a previous generation that was somehow inadequate and unable and now we’re the historical fulfillment. It’s not a progressive model, but simply a kind of reconstruction of the field. There’s new There’s new

work to look at, there are new issues, and work to look at, there are new issues, and how you start to navigate that field, and how you start to navigate that field, and for me the navigation of that inheritance, for me the navigation of that inheritance, as opposed to its overturning.as opposed to its overturning. It’s not that certain approaches are now worn out, but rather there’s work that doesn’t seem to have adequate descriptive terms associated yet. So that’s the interesting part, to try to expand the conversation to include that work.

PD: Bob, you know the answer to that question. You would say that it’s the death of the architect-critic as a hybrid figure. Now let’s say we actually have a polarization of designer and critic, which would be a form of deferral of expertise. The question is how to move forward. Do we need to reinstall the architect-critic, or is there another kind of figure or another kind of model to enable us to operate in the field of criticism differ-ently? I don’t know the answer to that, it’s just a speculation.

JM: I suppose on that note we’ll conclude. I want to thank all the participants first of all. It was fantastic to hear the breadth and depth of the work being done. I personally got a lot out of this exchange and I look forward to more. I’m inspired to go start writing again, and that’s a good sign.

Timothy Hyde: So it worked.

JM: It worked indeed.

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John McMorrough is Associate Professor and Architecture Section Head at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University

Lucia Allais is a postdoctorate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University

John Harwood is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture at Oberlin College.

Jeannie Kim is Director of the National Design Awards program at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

Enrique Walker is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Advanced Architecture at Columbia University.

Penelope Dean is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Ana Miljacki is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ariane Lourie-Harrison is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture

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Transcribed and Edited by Michael AbrahamsonPhotos by Addison GodelCover Concept by Julia McMorrough, based on original conference poster design by Omnivore

Special thanks to: Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Jeffrey Kipnis and the Herbert H. Baumer endowment

Produced By:The Ohio State UniversityKnowlton School of Architecture275 West Woodruff AveColumbus, OH 43210

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