Oxymoron&Pleonasm

Oxymoron & Pleonasm -------Conversations on American Critical and Projective Theory of Architecture

kf kmh mw mmcl bc sa jo rs sw ms jk sl + mm

kenneth frampton k. michael hays mark wigley mary mcleod beatriz colomina stan allen joan ockman robert somol sarah whiting michael speaks jeffrey kipnis sylvia lavin

monika mitášová (ed.)

To all lovers of dialogue and fictional polylogues.

kf: I’ve always been somewhat resistant to Popper because of

·

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

9

the liberal positivism lurking behind his discourse. I’m more interested in Foucault’s concept of episteme and the way in which this concept also appears in the writing of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn’s idea of a constantly changing episteme as in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 9 -----------------------------is a very powerful concept which may have marginally influenced my Modern Architecture: A Critical History.

mm: Does progress exist in the history of architecture, and in the

history of modern architecture in particular? kf: Your question reminds me of an exchange between myself

and Álvaro Siza. At some point I wrote to him to the effect “I understand you have many projects. You must be very happy,” or something banal like this. He wrote back, “Yes, it’s true, I have many projects. But I am not happy, because how can one be happy when Europe has no project?”

He’s a man of Left . . . and I appreciate the pessimistic realism that is latent in this remark.

·

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1941).

mm: You say that the last chapter of the first edition of your Modern

10

Architecture entitled »Place, Production and Architecture« is meant also as a polemical commentary on Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture. 10 --------------------------------------------------Does this extended historiography refuse affirmation, as was characteristic for the Frankfurt School? kf: Yes. My emphasis on place is an attempt to resist what

Heidegger calls the condition of space endlessness. mm: And would you say that innovation is affirmed as the final aim

and purpose of this history of modern architecture?

kf: Yes, it affirms innovation, but perhaps only in the spirit of

Adolf Loos’ aphorism, “There is no point in inventing anything unless it’s an improvement.”

mm: Your historiography of modern architecture matches Banham’s

hero architect Buckminster Fuller with two other heroes, Philip Johnson and Louis Kahn. It combines heroic figures with key

KF

17

events and inherent architectural “laws.” One might wonder if the creative force of this historiography is the inherent law of history, individualities, and precedents, or the harmony of all these three constituents.

kf: In my view Fuller, Johnson and Kahn are, in their different ways,

all postmodern figures. However, there is a tragic dimension to Kahn which one could contrast to Fuller; Fuller’s naive techno-idolatry versus Kahn’s acknowledgement of the loss of the city. Kahn is only too aware of the failure of our civilization to produce an environmental culture that is in any way comparable to the environmental cultures of the ancient world.

For his part, Johnson produced no work of value after his Glass House and the book on Mies, both dating from late in 1948.

mm: Another motif of this book of yours deals with the reconciliation

of the Enlightenment. In the context of your critique of postmodern architecture, is reason, understood and formulated by the Enlightenment, still governing horizons of our thinking and acting? Do we still live in the Enlightenment now?

kf: I believe that the potential of the Enlightenment still remains

partially valid. However, one could say that the instrumental side of the Enlightenment is its dark side. The more pacific, poetic aspect of the Enlightenment is surely represented by Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man 11 -------------------of 1794, in that it posits a symbiotically beneficial relationship between man and nature. Even though this potential remains, one begins to doubt whether we are capable of mediating its Promethean side.

11

·

mm: Your critical history includes also the term critical regionalism.

Rather than a style in itself, this is built of many elements across various architectural styles. Central among these terms are, I would say, edges or shifts, and place versus form and building.

The first reminds one of the critique of normativity, normality, or architecture as a normal science; the second is usually related to the critique of universal space. Both are critical of modernity, but you also stress regionalism as “local formations capable of generating modern, but nonetheless non-reductive architectural culture.” 12 ---------------------------------------------------How are these two contradictive aspects achievable at once?

·

Johann Christhoph Friedrich Schiller, »Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen,« Die Horen 1, 2, 6 (1795), ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson – L. A. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

12

·

Kenneth Frampton, ed., Architectural Design 42: Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (London: Academy Editions, 1982).

mm: In your speech at the Things in the Making conference (MoMA,

2000) you mentioned an earlier clash of Adorno’s critical theory with Adolf Loos’ pragmatism. Are similar collisions and clashes of critical theory with pragmatism periodically emerging in the history of architecture? Are collisions and clashes integral to architecture itself, and architects cannot or do not want to prevent and erase them? Or did your remark provide a pre-history of the ongoing debate by pointing to a previous one in a different context?

kmh: It was certainly intended to be the latter. I really was just

intending to, as you say, to look at this pre-historical moment by bringing up someone like Loos, who in a way, criminalized ornament, and to suggest that in a way, the treating of theory as merely ornamental is as ridiculous now as it was then.

We can see that what Loos said about ornament is, in a larger context, ridiculous. But we’re doing the same thing again, and essentially the pragmatism was the first word, I guess, right before the post-critical. But it really was the same intent. I read the intent as (I wasn’t saying it this way): doing theory is really hard. And designing buildings is, in some ways, much more fun, and in some ways, much more rewarding. And in some ways less work!

mm: Architects would probably argue that it is vice versa! kmh: Well, okay. So maybe that last part is not fair! But another way

of returning to practicality is an avoidance of critical thought.

And the ornament was meant to get that.

mm: You explained new pragmatism as a result of the permanent

self-historicization of critical method — as an inevitable matter and result of revisions. Can you comment, from a certain time distance, on what you think is the result of this ongoing inventory check? What instrumentarium has it formulated?

·

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986), trans.

Sean Hand, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

kmh: Wow. Your questions are getting more probative and more

11

difficult. Hmmm. I do think there’s a necessary and very fruitful movement to critical thought now. It really is a matter of folding, and inscribing, and reinscribing, and refolding, and I actually mean this in a Deleuzean way. In the Foucault book, 11 -----------

KMH Deleuze says that Foucault thinks about folding thought itself back on itself. 12 -------------------------------------------------------------And I do think there’s a kind of necessary folding to thought.

I think the instrumentarium is the fold, both in the sense of reaching back and pulling forward, but also in mapping a situation and then mapping the thought that mapped the situation . . . I think folding is very vivid.

mm: At the MoMA conference you led the polemic with pragmatism

as well as with the results of critical theory. With regards to Peter Eisenman you also said that he transformed praxis into a kind of theory. More generally, critical theory (in contrast with the declared unity with praxis) did not provide the dynamic impulses for praxis. Did anything change since the time you said that? What is the relation of permanently changing critical theory into contemporary praxis? What dynamic impulses does it offer now?

kmh: Well, I believe architecture produces ideas, or it expresses

concepts. However, I believe that writing is necessary to, in a way, recognize that the practice of writing is privileged in its ability to make connections temporally and spatially that are impossible for an actual architecture. I think, somehow, in recognition of that there was a generation and a group — and Eisenman is preeminent among them — who tried to turn architecture into writing, and who tried to make an architecture that did the work that writing about architecture normally does. And we know what that looks like.

I don’t know all the reasons. I think they have to do with the reasons we’ve been talking about, of digitization, globalization, etc., all the key words, that make that kind of architecture, if not impossible, then for whatever reason, it’s not being done. We’ve moved from a kind of writing and architecture as inscription, with all the kind of the permanence and the physicality of inscription, to a different ontology of the atmospheric. I don’t think we’ve clearly developed yet a kind of writing adequate to this emergent.

So I think we're actually going to change the way we write in order to be adequate to the new situation. And however

12

55

·

“To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coexistent inside.”

Deleuze, 118. [n.11]

mm: If you say that there is some criticality, usually, inherent in any

kind of creative thinking and act, including that of architects, and the same is true for politics, isn’t it possible to think of some philosophy —

mw: . . . that does not require translation? mm: Yes. If criticism, theory and politics (and it seems many other

fields: geometry, mathematics, physics, computing, for example) don’t require translation, why does philosophy require translation into architecture?

mw: Yeah, I don’t have a good answer. A lot of phenomenology

would see itself as a kind of thought through action-thinking through acting through living.

mm: It is probably also a kind of the reduction of preconceived

thoughts and judgments. But isn’t the architect in the sense of that question also kind of the philosopher of techne?

mw: Yeah, right. But thinking of the case of Derrida, you never get

rid of the platonic schema, he says so many times — you can’t.

It gets back to the original rupture. You can’t ever escape. So I’m not sure what to say. I could say yes, but I don’t believe it.

Like whenever a phenomenologist wants to explain that, they theorize, and they start using examples and images and they head into the world of translation. Of course, it’s inadequate to say to a phenomenologist, well, then, don’t talk to me, just do your thing! I suppose, in a Derridean sense, you would explore the opposite. You would say, let’s look at the lived actions of philosophers. Let’s pay close attention to their actual living, their bodies, their sounds, their smells, and so on. I guess this work of a close attention is done by some people; I think that’s interesting work, as it were — embed the voice of Plato in the kind of material, sensual, sexual lived world. Why not?

mm: In your MoMA catalog, you also addressed theory by saying

that the status of theory had changed. What strikes me in that text is that you explicitly point to the interrelation of the conceptual and pragmatic perspectives in deconstructive

MW

83

architecture, and this is exactly the opposite of what some contemporary critics of deconstruction (including projective architects and post-theorists) think. What is the role of theory in deconstructive architecture?

mw: Zero. It has zero role. Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman had

a self-conscious understanding of deconstruction. Libeskind had a kind of Babylon babble, not to discredit it. Gehry has a clearly defined anti-theory theory, and so on and so on.

This set of architects range from the most intensely, selfconsciously theoretical to the most intentionally, self-consciously anti-theoretical. Theory itself played no role. Well, to put it another way, in no way did their specific knowledge of theory (in the case of Tschumi and Eisenman) in any way contribute to their projects.

mm: From your »Recent Escapades of the Ancient Theory Virus,«

it seems that some theory is inherent in all architecture. You write: “No period in architecture can be any more or less theoretical than another. And no design can be any more or less theoretical than another. There simply is no architecture without theory.” 8 -------------------------------------------------------------So there probably was some theory involved in deconstructive architecture as well.

mw: Yeah, but it’s in the projects. The theories of deconstruction

play no role in the deconstructive architecture. But the projects are a thinking through of architecture, so they are theory.

mm: Okay. If architecture is always a theoretical act, along with

special or general theory forming an integral part of each creative work of architecture, there are also works and periods in history which explore certain theoretical continuities, contradictions, ruptures and singularities, opening the profession to the “outer” or the “other” theories, too. If Eisenman says his architecture is a built theory, it is, I would say, not the affirmative or even prescriptive theory built by many of his contemporaries, and it also differs from Mies’ architecture as a baukunst or Hannes Meyer’s architecture as a built science with its scientific theories. We do not necessarily have to

8

·

Mark Wigley, »Recent Escapades of the Ancient Theory Virus,« A+U, 10 (2001): 150–151.

I was part of a generation that was very deeply opposed to the Vietnam War — so many of my friends had struggled whether to be drafted or not; so many others had died or come back badly wounded or traumatized. There was such immense, futile tragedy on both sides — so this project had a special meaning for me. The essay was not a formal reading of Maya Lin’s design. Even though as an architect I appreciated the design, I was more interested in trying to understand how this minimal, dark, abstract memorial came to be built.

What role did the veterans themselves have in its creation?

How did public reaction influence what got built? And why were so many people, especially veterans and their families, so profoundly moved by it, when there was so much initial opposition to the design. These were the kind of questions I was trying to address. But apart from that, there was also the issue that it was designed by a woman, a young AsianAmerican woman, at that. This angered many of the critics.

·

Mary McLeod, »On Criticism,« Places 1 (Spring 1987): 4–6.

mm: Besides the articles discussed before that focus on certain

57

buildings or male and female architects, you also gave a conference talk on more general problems of criticism. You considered both operative and explanatory criticism and asked whether criticism should consider objects at one moment in time or objects historically, that is across time. 57 ----------------You understood this as a choice between the synchronic and diachronic approaches. At the end you proposed criticism of action and criticism as history. What is the position of architectural criticism now?

mmcl: That’s hard to answer because criticism is so diverse and

fragmented now. Also, with increasing numbers of trained architectural historians, there’s so much new historical work.

I don’t know if there’s anyone in journalism, in the popular press, with a distinct voice that speaks to practitioners. I miss the acerbic tongue of someone like Michael Sorkin, who wrote for the Village Voice in the late 1970s and 1980s. He just cut through pretense and fashion — and was fearless in exposing sides of architecture that most writers ignored or didn’t think to explore, such as Philip Johnson’s political ties to fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s. Today I especially appreciate Joan Ockman’s essays on contemporary practice and really

MMcL wish she had a regular forum in some publication. The piece that she wrote on Rem Koolhaas, »The Yes Man« 58 --------------is, for me, a model of the kind of sharp, critical writing we could use more of in architecture.

mmcl: I would hope so. I still believe strongly that there is a need

for serious critique, for intellectual probing, but also that any critical writing must be accessible and speak to more than just other theorists. But there are other possible modes of criticism, such as blogs, films, exhibitions and so on.

I also continue to believe deeply in the need for serious history.

I sense, though, that we’re in a pluralist phase, and that no one direction has emerged as dominant. In discussions about politics, though, there are a few names that keep surfacing, such as Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt.

But there are many other names and directions.

mm: Coming from Central Europe, I share certain doubts on both

a pre-critical and post-critical life, as well as on the idea of some uncritical present. But it seems these attitudes, paradoxically, become critical insofar as they rethink the very criticality itself.

mmcl: Yes. I would also add that real creativity depends on

critique — and vice versa. For me, creativity and critique are connected and in a kind of dialogue. Of course, architects create in different ways — and often take intuitive leaps. But recognizing that something isn’t right, that it’s not functioning or meaning as intended, or that one’s intentions or assumptions are themselves problematic, can encourage one to probe harder and confront present limitations, to create something that goes beyond the present conceptions of what is possible.

·

58

Joan Ockman, »The Yes Man,« Architecture 3 (March 2002): 76–79.

59

Mary McLeod, »Theory and Practice,« Assemblage 41 (2000): 51.

mm: In the final issue of Assemblage in 2000, you concluded that

“architecture theory has run out of gas.” 59 --------------------------At the same time, in characterizing the contemporary situation in architecture schools, you wrote that you detected an anti-intellectual current. It seems that while, as you argue, poststructuralism and deconstruction was hermetic and almost exclusively self-validating, the cool and easy projection of current architecture is anti-intellectual. Is there a way beyond both?

143

·

mm: If we think of various strategies of thinking and writing on

architecture, what was and is your own project of writing?

Is it a project of critical history, critical theory or something else?

Do you understand yourself more as a critic, historian, or writer on architecture? bc: The word critical has become completely cliché. The overuse

“There is no such thing as criticism, there is only history.” Richard Ingersoll interviews Manfredo Tafuri, »There is no Criticism, Only History,« Design Book Review, Spring 1986, rpt. in Casabella 619/620 (1995): 97.

· ·

6

of the term has devalued it. Remember that article of Tafuri: »There is no Criticism; Only History«? 6 -------------------------------I probably have something close to that position too.

But I like to think of myself more like an architect than a historian, an architect who writes. At the core of my writing there is always architecture, and there is also an architecture to my writing. Structure is very important to me.

mm: So if you are not interested in a critical project or position,

what’s the nature of your writing project in general?

bc: The core of my writing has been dedicated to the relationships

between architecture and media. When I started writing, the focus was on early 20th century media: architectural magazines, film, photography, radio, television . . . and the way architects used these new media as a new site of architectural production. In recent years, an unexpected media revolution has taken place, of at least the same significance as the one that brought us photography, film, illustrated magazines and modern publicity, has taken place. The internet, email, blogs, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc., have profoundly changed the way we work, write, analyze, interact play or even make love. Can we expect architecture not to be affected? To think about this transformation is part of my current project.

mm: Your interest in the relationship between architecture and

media also inspired a new program you founded at Princeton University, entitled Media and Modernity. How did you structure it? Is it associated exclusively with the School of Architecture?

bc: No, it is completely interdisciplinary. I am the first director,

but in fact it is a collaborative effort from a number of people

BC

155

at Princeton who, for years, had been trying to establish this kind of interdisciplinary think tank. It is a certificate program.

Basically you do a degree in architecture, music, art history, philosophy . . . or whatever you’re doing your degree in, and you can do a certificate by taking a number of classes outside your department that fulfill the requirements in the program Media and Modernity. And you also take a core class in Media and Modernity, which is an interdisciplinary class usually cotaught by two people from different departments. For example, Mike Jennings taught with Eduardo Cadava on photography, Hal Foster with Brigid Doherty on Dada, I have taught with Tom Levin on surveillance, etc. Every year it changes.

mm: As you have pointed out in Privacy and Publicity, seeing,

the sight as well as vision, the visual prevailed as the major sensibilities and formative senses in the work of Le Corbusier, and also partially in the work of Adolf Loos. In addition, you also introduced other senses, the bodily experience, and feminine and masculine sexuality into the discourse about modernism. In your introduction to the symposium proceedings Sexuality and Space you say that it is an attempt to address an absence of the issue of sexuality by rereading “theories of sexuality in architectural terms and rereading architecture in sexual terms.” 7 ------------------------------------------------------------Did you understand it as related to the rethinking of gender, feminism and other related issues in critical architecture or as some independent project of its own kind?

7

·

Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

bc: Well, you asked what is my project, so I suppose this is my

second project, right? The second one, which doesn’t mean that it’s less important, is the question of sexuality in architecture.

I deliberately didn’t want to frame it in questions of gender only. I wanted to bring out more the psychoanalytical dimension. I had been influenced at that time by Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision 8 ------------------------------and by other film theories, which is also evident in Privacy and Publicity. Film theory at that point was much more advanced theoretically than architecture.

In architecture you only had this kind of simplistic gender question “Where are the women in architecture?” which

·

8 Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986).

graduate students at Princeton, I kept asking them: “What exactly would you give up if you gave up the critical?” right?

In fact, it is precisely — you could say — the uncritical acceptance of the necessity to be critical which I found so puzzling. And it’s also that there’s a kind of gut level reluctance, a fear that somehow you’re going to be unethical if you give up the critical. I was asked to write various things, and at the end of the day, I never wrote anything, and I did have a number of drafts. And one of the things I did was to identify as clearly as I could what I thought the varieties of what had been called critical practices were — because this is another symptom — in all the passionate defenses of the critical, no one actually spells out what a critical practice looks like.

·

Michael K. Hays, »Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,« Perspecta 21 (1984): 14–29.

22

I think there are four; I would be happy if someone could enlarge the list, but I think if you identify these four tendencies, they pretty much cover the spectrum. So in no particular order the first is the project of resistance, which was best described

by Michael Hays. Remember, he started Assemblage, which was defined (right there on the masthead) as a Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture. And in 1986 Michael wrote the Mies piece that was published in Perspecta, with “Critical architecture,” in the title, 22 -----------------------------------------------right? So his was a kind of Frankfurt School notion — that architecture could resist commodification by stripping away all that excess which made it easy to be incorporated into the commodity system or to be consumed by the bourgeois audience. And of course, his examples were Mies, Loos, and Hannes Meyer. So that’s one form of the resistance, right?

That to refuse the commoditization of architecture through a rigorous stripping down of architecture is a kind of critical practice, potentially associated with strategies of minimalism.

But then you have to look at people like John Pawson, designing clothing shops, and — where’s the resistance?

I was very, very sympathetic with Michael Hays’ project, and I think it’s an interesting formulation, but highly suspect as a kind of long-term project of resistance. We only have to look at the language. Minimalism so easily became absorbed in the very commodity system that tried to hold at arm’s length.

SA

219

Now, Eisenman. I think Eisenman, although he wouldn’t put in these terms, is basically working through a sort of Brechtian or Shklovskian project of defamiliarization, * that the architecture itself should create that moment of defamiliarization that would cause the spectator to step back and interrogate the fundamental assumptions of architecture itself. Now, I have a lot of problems with that as a working strategy. It’s a very limited notion of spectatorship: the viewer as reader. It brings up the problem of fragmentation and discontinuity; you get into the problem of the perception of architecture over time: Benjamin’s evocation of habit and touch as the main ways we engage architecture. Through fragmentation and disjunction, you may be able to evoke that sort of shock that triggers the interrogation the first time you see a piece of architecture; what about the hundredth time you visit a building, right? Defamiliarization is for me fundamentally at odds with the way that architecture inhabits the world. So there again: hard to find a kind of viable long-term project there.

And then there was the project which I would have identified with the earlier work of Diller-Scofidio [+ Renfro], which basically emerges out of the critical practices of the art world of the 1980s. They took advantage of a well developed body of theory to introduce into architecture questions of gender, identity, and politics. But they could only do so by stepping back from architecture’s instrumental and institutional basis, and assuming another context. And again, that was totally a discursive project, bound up to the gallery and the installation. And if you want to know how viable that has been, you only have to look at the kind of intellectual struggles that they’re going through now in trying to create a kind of critical practice in the context of doing big institutional art buildings. Is Alice Tully Hall [designed in 2003, built in 2009] a critical project? I don’t think so. All of the mainstream media have raved about the project; I think it’s a good building, but DS+R now belong, for better or worse, to the culture industry. As a critical project it’s a failed project, because it’s now operating in the very territory they were previously attacking.

Ed. Note: Brecht’s “defamiliarization” (Verfremdung) here denotes two concepts that are usually distinct. The second * [is Shklovsky’s term and concept defamiliarization, estrangement (ostranenie).]

This doesn’t exactly answer your question about why anthologies became popular in the 1990s; it goes more to the question of why the book contains different types of texts from the periods before and after. The period documents are different just as the period architecture is different.

By the way, I was asked to write the sequel to my book, and I said no, I really don’t want to write the history of the present.

That’s when Michael Hays was brought in; I recommended him. I felt I was able to get sufficient historical distance on the period from the 1940s through the 1960s even though it was still pretty close. Michael includes his colleagues and his friends in his book. It was a different kind of production.

mm: Sylvia Lavin in her »Theory into History« article sees anthologies

and compendia of modern and contemporary architecture texts as contradictory institutions because anthologies historicize the project of modern architecture, modern theory, and criticism. What are the limits of the anthologization of thinking and writing on modern and contemporary architecture?

An anthology is sort of both an archive and museum, isn’t it?

jo: Yes, it’s a collection of artifacts, or documents, or fragments,

if you like, as we’ve been saying. It’s a montage of differences.

The organization, the structuring of the collection, is where the art of the anthology lies; it’s the creative part. Putting together an anthology is a very different activity from writing a continuous narrative, long or short. In an anthology it’s the connections and articulations between the different pieces that allow something new to emerge. Without these connections, it’s just a bunch of texts to be assigned in a survey course.

I think to do an anthology well requires a great deal of reflection about interrelationships, about balance. It needs judicious editing. Curating is the more fashionable word today.

In one place or another I might have chosen a different text, except that I thought that this one would reverberate well with that one. In some cases, decisions were made based on the fact that something had been published widely already, or wasn’t published at all, or would be a great service to translate for the first time. Some purely pragmatic decisions

JO were made. But usually things were included because I thought they would work well with others in the book, or conversely they were excluded because I felt they would be redundant or distracting. My original intent was only to have one text by any author. Yet in a few cases, that of Ernesto Rogers, for instance, I decided it was important to catch his thinking at three different moments; I found his thinking so seminal, and so unknown to most American readers, that I thought it was justified to include three different texts. Similarly with Louis Kahn, who isn’t a writer at all, yet it seemed worthwhile to show a trajectory from his early period to his mature one.

So I included both his text on monumentality — his first published piece of writing — and a more characteristic later utterance. Their differences speak to the evolution in his thinking from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s.

Another thing I’ve done a lot of thinking about over the years, but starting with the anthology, is how you periodize history.

How do you decide where to locate the brackets defining a particular period? History is like a loaf of bread. You can take a knife and cut anywhere you want. But you have to be able to justify the cuts. Constructs like decades — the 1950s, the 1960s — what do they mean? Actually, “the 1960s” as we typically tend of think about this decade — as a period of revolutionary upheaval — didn’t really start until 1963 or so, at least in the United States, after Kennedy’s assassination.

And it lasted until 1973 or so: the oil crisis, Watergate, the end of the draft. These thresholds need to be located. And there are, of course, certain thresholds that are specific to architecture and others that are more general. I thought long and hard: does 1968 really make sense as an end date for this anthology of architecture? I wasn’t sure, but I liked the neat span of 25 years, 1943 to 1968 — that was nice. And I decided that the closing of the École des Beaux-Arts after 350 years was indeed a significant enough architectural event to make 1968 meaningful. Architecture was also strongly implicated in the strikes that took place on the Columbia campus that year. So I said to myself, okay, 1968 makes sense. As far as the beginning date, 1943, that was easier. I wanted to start at the turning point of the war, the moment it became clear which side was going to win. The opening document

239

mm: How and why did you become interested in architecture and

cultural history, having an A.B. from Brown University (1982), a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in the history of culture from the University of Chicago (1997)?

rs: Yeah, how did I get here? It’s funny — and part of the answer

might be one of your still missing interviewees, which is Peter [Eisenman]. I think that Peter brought a lot of people into the field who weren’t of the field as a way of expanding the discussion. Initially, I suppose, that was a way to displace the tradition of architecture toward a critical project. I think he brought outsiders in as a way of critiquing. People that fell under his influence — some were already in architecture, like Sarah [Whiting], and Greg Lynn; in a different way, Michael Hays would have been in that category — but many of us, like Jeff Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, myself, Michael Speaks, for that matter — obviously Mark Wigley. So Peter is a collector of these people.

And in some way I was already writing about architecture.

Let’s say that after law school my own work had always been interested in this interface of aesthetics and politics. At Brown it was a mix of that. Then I ended up at law school largely because I was interested in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and Roberto Unger. For me, Unger is the source of the issue of the projective.

The CLS was the intellectual sort of poststructuralist or deconstructive reading of the law. It struck me at the time that architecture was undergoing the same sorts of pressures as law, so it was sort of interesting to look at this other. While I was at law school I was also sitting in at courses at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). It was actually the same time — although I didn’t meet them then — that Jeff Kipnis and Peter Eisenman were co-teaching at the GSD. And then I started a magazine called Copyright with Alice Jardine, Brian Massumi and others.

That really led to pursuing a Ph.D. in the history of culture.

So even though I probably went through the critical tradition, I was maybe exposed to the projective — in law, at least — before the critical, and that’s what it came back to in architecture. And part of having to go through the critical may have just been really learning the disciplinary

RS of architecture. When you come from the outside, at least for me, there was a desire to occupy the center from the outside. Therefore, the canon became really important to absorb oneself in, and even if one initially engaged the canon as a model of critique — for example taking on the texts of Colin Rowe — the thing that you study a lot as a way to critique becomes you, in a way. You internalize all of those things at the same time that you are trying to produce escape philosophy from them. And so it sneaks up on you. But I think the interest in sort of the political and the aesthetic was why, in a sense, I went to law. And then I decided that I didn’t want a career in law, the practice in the profession of law.

When I’m going back to this idea of people from other fields, there were a lot of people from comparative literature, or even classics: people like Ann Bergren, Catherine Ingraham, or Michael Speaks, who came out of [Fredric] Jameson, but also from the sciences, you could say, which was Sanford’s trajectory; and in some sense Jeff Kipnis was both physics and art together. My ethic was the only one that probably came in from law —

mm: . . . Joan Ockman also studied law for some time. rs: Yeah, that’s why we get along, I guess. So I think in my current

interests — and I really repressed that background when I entered architecture, in some way — and now have it back, increasingly — that’s what’s trying to re-motivate this idea of a political dimension to architecture, therefore a projective one. It’s not political critique, but political imagination. And I think that’s really what Roberto Unger’s work at Harvard was about, and also his work in organizing Brazil and all of the books on politics and passion. It’s also from Unger in the early 1980s that the term plasticity enters my vocabulary. I don’t mean it like Neo-plasticism plasticity, or plastic materials, the way other people do, but really the possibility of transformative surprising relationships in the world. The world is plastic and susceptible to change and to rearrange behavioral organizational associational relationships. Unger’s idea of how could you think about modernism as an institutional platform, and not merely a critique of classical institutional platforms — I really think

259

of visual analysis and that those booklets have gotten thicker and thicker over the years has been interpreted by some as “the more pages of information you have, the better you are.”

Book-bricks are being produced all over the world, which have pages and pages of “research” that consists of little more than thinly veiled Google searches. The research produced by AMO is not merely a collection of information: it’s a keen analysis of that information with the aim of offering design platforms (not solutions, but platforms).

·

Rem Koolhaas – Sarah Whiting, »Spot Check: A Conversation,« Assemblage 40 (1999): 36–56.

·

mm: In your conversation with Rem Koolhaas, 2 ---------------------------2

sw: Well, okay. That’s jumping to the issue of the distinction

Robert Somol – Sarah Whiting, »Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,« Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77.

you discussed recent OMA projects forming “a new whole,” as you named it. Does OMA’s transition to the architecture of “a new figurative whole” of image and object (or logo-figure unity) exceed critical practices? Or is it an affirmation of the decline and closure of certain modes of critical practices?

3

between the projective and the critical, so let’s address that first, which means addressing the Doppler article 3 ---------------that Bob Somol and I wrote in 2002. I have made that distinction before, but it seems that people don’t necessarily understand that our point was not to say, “the critical project is dead”; it was to say, “the critical project has become rote, it has become predictable.” In order to shake the critical project out of this stagnation and move it to a new level (let me underscore that), it needs to abandon its complacency. For us it was so obvious that it felt like a rather dumb argument. We were extraordinarily bored by what the critical project had become: you would go to school reviews, and you could practically present the student’s project, because you knew okay, it was about the margins, it took a known approach and turned it exactly 180 degrees. The critical had become boring, because what was supposedly radical had become entirely predictable.

mm: But it also means that such a project wasn’t critical, in fact.

sw: Exactly, exactly. That’s a very important point, because

while many projects possessed the semblance of criticality, they weren’t really critical and criticality was becoming a dead-end term, let alone project. And so the idea

SW of the projective — which is different from the people who are calling for the end of the critical project, or the end of theory — the idea of the projective was to say: we have respect for the original critical project, but we think that followers of the critical’s innovators are getting lazy, just sort of sitting on their derrières and repeating known gestures, tropes, forms, and programmatic moves instead of moving architecture forward. In order for our field to move forward it has to consciously posit a new possibility, which is precisely what the original critical project did. So I think part of the problem with the language is that people assume that projective is in contrast to critical, and really it’s just saying actually the original critical project was projective; certainly I think Peter Eisenman’s project was a projective project, and Michael Hays’s reading of Mies read a projective criticality in Mies.

What I find to be not only boring but irresponsible is when people only criticize, when people only take things apart.

That kind of work doesn’t make the world any different.

It’s just a shirking of responsibility, posing as something interesting. I think that the reason why such posing became so fashionable is that it’s easy and safe. We are all experts at finding flaws in proposed projects, at saying “Look at this corner here where that board comes through, that terrible detail. And it contradicts your original argument! That’s shit!”

We’ve all become very good at that kind of shitkicking. It goes back to your previous question, because Ron and I are now designing a house for great clients. We can’t just talk with those clients about all the houses in Princeton that are really terrible. We actually have to say okay, now we have to make ourselves vulnerable by offering a design that we know others can critique, but that we have to put forward. If you’re willing to make yourself vulnerable, you have to posit something, and project a possible new future.

To get back then to your question about the idea of this projected, fragile totality, which I perceived in those works that OMA was doing at that moment: this phase in the office was preceded by a very significant moment in the office around the 1989 projects, which formed Platonic wholes. In short, they were singularities with complexity inside. These projects (ZKM,

321

mm: How did these processes influence our understanding

of something like an initial idea, an experiment, and research in architecture?

· ·

Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1985). See also Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (HarperCollins Publishers: New York, 1993).

ms: Let me discuss research by drawing a distinction between

12

problem solving and innovation, something you asked me about earlier. There’s a very famous distinction drawn by business thinker Peter Drucker, 12 --------------------------------------an Austrian, who became the father of modern management theory; he taught for many years in the U.S., and he wrote many books on innovation. But he drew this very simple distinction. He says that problem solving is when you come to me with a problem and I offer you a solution to that problem. Innovation occurs when you come to me with a problem and I help you rewrite that problem in the form of a question that you had not asked but that adds something new. The new question and the answer were not anticipated in the form of the original question.

Let’s take an architectural example. If I’m an architect and you’re a client, and you come to me with a brief, and you say, I would like a house with a red roof and a green window and a blue door, and if I give you a house with a red roof, a green window, and a blue door, then I’ve added no value. I’ve simply completed the problem that you gave me. I add nothing to the problem. I add no value. That’s typically what architects do — they’re problem-solvers. Innovation is when you come to me with a problem: I want a green window and a blue foundation and a yellow roof. I say to you, maybe you don’t need a house; maybe you need a barn, or maybe you would rather do this out of wood. I use my accumulated design knowledge, the design intelligence built over successful and failed projects, and informed by this intelligence, I question your initial problem and help you to ask a different, more relevant question. And in doing so, I add value. Now, that’s innovation.

mm: And how does this relate to research? ms: Most architecture practices work by problem solving. Architects

are, for the most part, service providers. You ask them to do ABC, and they do ABC. There are, of course, firms that

MS don’t do that, and I would say the ones that get paid more and deserve more are those that are innovative. But that distinction is a really important distinction; it’s a distinction that is made even stronger when you add the idea of prototyping, because one of the ways that you can discover what to add, and the way to rethink the question, is in fact to prototype the possible answers in order to discover new forms of asking the question.

And I would say that’s where research and architectural education has begun to change. At many of the most storied programs, those schools regarded as intellectual centers of architectural discussion and debate in the U.S., research means researching the philosophical, historical, theoretical problems of the architectural past, and finding ways to bring those questions to bear on the present and the future. So research is scholarly research. And that is very important, especially as historical knowledge and precedent are certainly intelligence. But you also must produce knowledge and create intelligence; you cannot rely on what has been produced historically. In schools like mine, research is about taking existing problems and their constraints, and transforming those problems posed by clients — cities, states, individuals, NGOs — into new questions, and offering, as a result, innovative solutions, solutions that had not been anticipated by the client. That is a different kind of research, because research is not like it was with ideals, or with ideology — looking for existing truths and applying them to the present, and to the future. Research, in fact, is about taking on existing problems, reexamining them, transforming those questions by the knowledge that you built up through experience and through the production of possible solutions into different questions, which then offer the opportunity to give solutions that are innovative. So, today research is no longer looking to discover some existing truth, or find or produce an ideology to which one might adhere. Research is instead a systematic effort to discover plausible solutions that can be tested and turned into real actionable designs.

mm: But in almost any field, in the exact sciences, even in humanities

or arts, there usually is some relation between what is called theoretical research and experimental research. So what’s so wrong with theoretical research, if it comes with formulation of the problems and hypothesis in experimental research?

373

·

Jeffrey Kipnis, »On Criticism,« Harvard Design Magazine 23 (2005) 96–104.

mm: Is it that theorizing by critique or criticism you mentioned 16

in your text »On Criticism« published in Harvard Design Magazine, 16 ------------------------------------------------------------------where you reviewed Rafael Moneo’s anthology and also briefly touched on the problem of valuing theory above or over criticism? jk: Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I’m talking about.

·

Kipnis. [n.12]

mm: Along with journal and catalogue texts you also wrote

17

monographs on architects (for example, Johnson), and monographs on buildings (for example, the aforementioned Holl’s museum extension), as well as a book of the aforementioned aphorisms. Philip Johnson, in his foreword to the aphorisms book, says on theory: “Kipnis’ form, the aphorism, fits practice.” 17 --------------------------------------------What design practice fits the theory written in the form of aphorism? jk: Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. Philip loved Nietzsche. And what

he liked about it was that you didn’t really have to understand everything, you just had to say you could think, and it didn’t matter if you knew how it fitted to a huge body of his work.

It was like a brick. You didn’t have to know the whole house, but you could like the brick. And for him that was useful.

He didn’t really think I even knew what I was talking about particularly. But every once in a while you’d write something, and it would hit a chord with him. And for him that’s how theory should be, you know, just a way to stimulate him as a kind of cup of coffee without requiring him to enter into a sober relationship with understanding. Actually, I prefer that myself. Philip was really interesting. I think we miss him.

We completely underestimated him as an architect. I expected by now most of his work to have subsided, and actually, when you look at it more, it becomes more and more interesting.

mm: You also wrote about Derrida’s texts, interpreting them

as labyrinthine writing.

jk: Yeah, that was the key moment for me, when I wanted

the architecture to be simple.

JK

mm: Isn’t the labyrinthine quality of Derrida’s writing true for your

way of writing as well? Aren’t your texts some kind of “third writing”? Aphoristic, subversive and bastardized, in a way?

jk: It used to be. Most people say I’m clear, that it’s easy

to read. But I don’t write as well as I’d like to. It’s not very creative writing.

mm: Why do you think so? What’s creative writing on

architecture, then?

jk: Well, I don’t know. If you read Bob [Somol] . . . or Reyner

Banham — he just writes well. I think it takes some work to read my writing. I wish it didn’t. I don’t mean it to take work.

By the time I’m reading it, it’s easy for me. People tell me that they really like it, but they have to actually sit down and concentrate really hard to read it, not because the ideas are unusual, but because the way I unfold the ideas, the rhetoric, is unusual.

mm: You don’t only have to concentrate on it; it’s also a sort

of game — the playful battle, provocation . . .

jk: Yeah, I hope so. I put a lot more humor in it than people see. mm: How do you write? jk: Oh, it’s horrible. It’s one of the greatest pleasures you can have;

it’s also one of the worst nightmares. It’s just so hard to do.

You eat, and you pace, and you want to run away . . . and it never goes away, you know. To be a really good writer — and I’ve done this before, I’ve gone a couple years where I wrote every day, and I’ve gone a couple years where I haven’t written anything, because I’d just freak out. I’ve been teaching a lot for the last year and a half, so I haven’t written anything of any significance in a little more than a year. So I’m actually seriously trying to get back to work on the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana by Eero Saarinen [designed and built in 1957].

The way I write is I open a thing. Literally. I call it vomiting.

For a couple of days I write out whatever comes to mind: good,

399

what this paper says about the latest building. It always matters on that day, to the person who’s being written about.

I’m not sure how much cultural weight in the long run it has, because it’s not a reading culture anymore. I just don’t think the newspapers have that kind of authority. So that is for sure.

In other, more classic ways, do people listen to what you say and then try to find ways to design around it? I suppose some do. But you’d have to ask them. I really don’t know.

·

Sylvia Lavin, »The Uses and Abuses of Theory,« 113–114. [n.5] Also see essays written in response: Jeffrey Kipnis, »Rebuttal:

Theory Used and Abused,« Progressive Architecture 71 (1990): 98–99, and K. Michael Hays, »Rebuttal: Theory as Mediated Practice,« Progressive Architecture 71 (1990): 100.

·

·

mm: “Criticism is not an objective science but rather a creative art,” 19

you wrote in »The Uses and Abuses of Theory.« 19 ------------------Are there also other ways of current thinking and writing on history, theory, on projective creativity in architecture, being turned into the art practices now? sl: Well, it’s like what I was just discussing in my seminar.

I certainly think that the moment that you start thinking of criticism as a writerly practice (which I wasn’t thinking so much back then, but I would think now) would definitely approach the kinds of things that have been said about curatorial practice — that it has a kind of performativity and produces affects of its own. And whether it’s important or not to call those art, I would not say that now. But it is certainly not merely reactive in the classical sense of the object produced by an artist and responded to by a critic. That I don’t think is the paradigm anymore. mm: In this situation, do you understand previously formulated

critical practices of resistance to classical and modern architecture, which in Eisenman’s case also introduced the shift from the metaphysical project of architecture to architecture after the metaphysical, as accomplished, or still active and ­ open-ended? Are they adaptive and adaptable? Or are these critical practices ignored and abandoned, unfinished by contemporary non-critical practices?

sl: Okay, well, I just opened the show yesterday that I curated

at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) * called Take Note, and it takes as its ground zero Peter Eisenman’s Notes on Conceptual Architecture. So it takes exactly your question

* [Ed. Note: The CCA hosted Sylvia Lavin’s exhibition Take Note in the Octagonal Gallery from February 4 to May 30 2010.]

SL and unfolds what I consider to be its continued significance and legacy and operativity in ways that I think were pretty unexpected for people. So yes, I definitely think that it’s still going, although it no longer bears the name of Peter Eisenman.

It’s not a question of influence in that way. It’s a kind of joke that Peter’s »Notes on Conceptual Architecture« 20 ----------------(it’s a project with no text) ends with the thing “Please write to me at the Institute, and I’ll send you a text,” and try as I might, hours that I spent in the archive, I can find no evidence that anybody ever asked to read the text. So if that was a text that was never written by anybody, by any conventional standard, that would have to be a flash in the pan — something without consequence. Although, in fact, that’s not the best way to read its influence, and it had quite a broad set of influences, and it produced a fundamentally different sense of the relationship between the material practice of architecture and the conceptual practice of architecture. It didn’t not have a material practice, which I think has been the error; it had one, but it opened a looseness in the relationship between them that I think is still very powerful and very strong, but very open in its interpretive possibilities.

20

429

·

Peter D. Eisenman, »Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition,« Design Quarterly 78/79 (1970): 1–5.

So I would see that in the exquisitely intelligent dumb box of a Rem Koolhaas . . . I mean, you have to be able to maintain in your mind at the same time the operations of material and concept to be able to do what he does. But I also think that I see that in digital practices. I think absolutely the legacy is unfolded, but it no longer goes by the name of Peter Eisenman.

mm: So is resistance futile or not, now? 21 -------------------------------------

sl: Kissing is better. 22 -----------------------------------------------------------

21 “ Resistance is futile” became popular from its use in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. It appears also in Sylvia Lavin’s introductory text in Crib Sheets, [n.5], addressing critical thinking in contemporary architecture. Jeffery Kipnis responded to it in his polemics »Is Resistance Futile?« Log 5 (2005): 105–109.

·

·

22

·

Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).