Can one attempt to make a contribution to architectural discourse by relentlessly stating that there is no space without event, no architecture without program? This seems to be our mandate at a time that has witnessed the revival of historicism or, alternatively, of formalism in almost every architectural circle. Our work argues that architecture – its social relevance and formal invention – cannot be dissociated from the events that «happen» in it. Recent projects insist constantly on issues of program and notation.They stress a critical attitude that observes, analyzes, and interprets some of the most controversial positions of past and present architectural ideologies.
Yet this work often took place against the mainstream of the prevalent architectural discourse. For throughout the 1970s there was an exacerbation of stylistic concerns at the expense of programmatic ones and a reduction of architecture as a form of knowledge to architecture as knowledge of form. From modernism to postmodernism, the history of architecture was surreptitiously turned into a history of styles. This perverted form of history borrowed from semiotics the ability to «read» layers of interpretation but reduced architecture to a system of surface signs at the expense of the reciprocal, indifferent, or even conflictive relationship of spaces and events.
This is not the place for an extensive analysis of the situation that engulfed the critical establishment. However, it should be stressed that it is no accident that this emphasis on stylistic issues corresponded to a double and wider phenomenon: on the one hand, the increasing role of the developer in planning large buildings, encouraging many architects to become mere decorators, and on the other, the tendency of many architectural critics to concentrate on surface readings, signs, metaphors, and other modes of presentation, often to the exclusion of spatial or programmatic concerns. These are two faces of a single coin, typical of an increasing desertion by the architectural profession of ist responsibilities vis-à-vis the events and activities that take place in the spaces it designs.
At the start of the 1980s, the notion of program was still forbidden territory. Programatic concerns were rejected as leftovers from obsolete functionalist doctrines by those polemicists who saw programs as mere pretexts for stylistic experimentation. Few dared to explore the relation between the formal elaboration of spaces and the invention of programs, between the abstraction of architectural thought and the representation of events.The popular dissemination of architectural images through eye-catching reproductions in magazines often turned architecture into a passive object of contemplation instead of the place that confronts spaces and actions. Most exhibitions of architecture in art galleries and museums encouraged «surface» practice and presented the architect’s work as a form of decorative painting.Walls and bodies, abstract planes and figures were rarely seen as part of a single signifying system. History may one day look upon this period as the moment of the loss of innocence in twentieth – century architecture: the moment when it became clear that neither supertechnology, expressionist functionalism, nor neo-Corbusianism could solve society’s ills and that architecture was not ideologically neutral. A strong political upheaval, a rebirth of critical thought in architecture, and new developments in history and theory all triggered a phenomenon whose consequences are still unmeasured. This general loss of innocence resulted in a variety of moves by architects according to their political or ideological leanings. In the early 1970s, some denounced architecture altogether, arguing that its practice, in the current socioeconomic context, could only be reactionary and reinforce the status quo.Others, influenced by structural linguistics, talked of «constants» and the rational autonomy of an architecture that transcended all social forms. Others reintroduced political discourse and advocated a return to preindustrial forms of society. And still others cynically took the analyses of style and ideology by Barthes, Eco, or Baudrillard and diverted them from their critical aims, turning them over like a glove. Instead of using them to question the distorted, mediated nature of architectural practice, these architects injected meaning into their buildings artificially, through a collage of historicist or metaphorical elements. The restricted notion of postmodernism that ensued – a notion diminished by comparison with literature or art – completely and uncritically reinserted architecture into the cycle of consumption.
At the Architectural Association (AA) in London, I devised a program entitled «Theory, Language, Attitudes.» Exploiting the structure of the AA, which encouraged autonomous research and independent lecture courses, it played on an opposition between political and theoretical concerns about the city (those of Baudrillard, Lefèbvre, Adorno, Lukàcs, and Benjamin, for example) and an art sensibility informed by photography, conceptual art, and performance. This opposition between a verbal critical discourse and a visual one suggested that the two were complementary. Students’ projects explored that overlapping sensibility, often in a manner sufficiently obscure – to generate initial hostility through the school. Of course the codes used in the students’ work differed sharply from those seen in schools and architectural offices at the time. At the end-of-year exhibition texts, tapes, films, manifestos, rows of storyboards, and photographs of ghostlike figures, each with their own specific conventions, intruded in a space arranged according to codes disparate from those of the profession.
Photography was used obsessively: as «live» insert, as artificial documentation, as a hint of reality interposed in architectural drawing – a reality nevertheless distanced and often manipulated, filled with skillful staging, with characters and sets in their complementary relations. Students enacted fictitious programs inside carefully selected «real» spaces and then shot entire photographic sequences as evidence of their architectural endeavors. Any new attitude to architecture had to question its mode of representation.
Other works dealing with a critical analysis of urban life were generally in written form. They were turned into a book, edited, designed, printed, and published by the unit; hence, «the words of architecture became the work of architecture,» as we said. Entitled A Chronicle of Urban Politics, the book attempted to analyze what distinguished our period from the preceding one. Texts on fragmentation, cultural dequalification, and the «intermediate city» analyzed consumerism, totems, and representationalism. Some of the texts announced, several years in advance, preoccupations now common to the cultural sphere: dislocated imagery, artificiality, representational reality versus experienced reality.
The mixing of genres and disciplines in this work was widely attacked by the academic establishment, still obsessed with concepts of disciplinary autonomy and self-referentiality. But the significance of such events is not a matter of historical precedence or provocation. In superimposing ideas and perceptions, words and spaces, these events underlined the importance of a certain kind of relationship between abstraction and narrative – a complex juxtaposition of abstract concepts and immediate experiences, contradictions, superimpositions of mutually exclusive sensibilities. This dialectic between the verbal and the visual culminated in 1974 in a series of «literary» projects organized in the studio, in which texts provided programs or events on which students were to develop architectural works. The role of the text was fundamental in that it underlined some aspect of the complementing (or, occasionally, lack of complementing) of events and spaces. Some texts, like Italo Calvino’s metaphorical descriptions of “lnvisible Cities,» were so «architectural» as to require going far beyond the mere illustration of the author’s already powerful descriptions; Franz Kafka’s Burrow challenged conventional architectural perceptions and modes of representation; Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (done during my term as Visiting Critic at Princeton University) suggested parallels between narrative and spatial sequences. Such explorations of the intricacies of language and space naturally had to touch on james joyce’s discoveries. During one of my trips from the United States I gave extracts from Finnegans Wake as the program. The site was London’s Covent Garden and the architecture was derived, by analogy or opposition, from Joyce’s text. The effect of such research was invaluable in providing a framework for the analysis of the relations between events and spaces, beyond functionalist notions. The unfolding of events in a literary context inevitably suggested parallels to the unfolding of events in architecture.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (1994)
