Journal Review: Oppositions (original) (raw)
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Bagh-e Nazar, 2021
Problem statement: Undoubtedly, the current trend of modernism in the late twentieth century has been criticized by architectural journals. These critiques have moreover shaped postmodern architecture and also have represented the currents of the theory of pro-modernism. Oppositions-as the most well-known architectural journal in the late twentieth century-has included a variety of authors and critics from both perspectives. The question is: "During the activity of Opposition, what approaches does this journal take to the critique of modernism?" With this attitude, an attempt will be made to study the position of Opposition in the formation of after Modernism architectural theories. It can be argued that Oppositions
Oppositions Revisited - The Oppositions Reader
2013
Oppositions is »now recognized as the definitive document and source in the emerging theorization of architecture that took place in (America) after 1970« asserts Ke vin Lippert in his Preface to the Oppositions Reader. This is no mere hubris on the part of the publisher, for Oppositions introduced the American architectural public at least those at the universities to the tone and quality of the debate fostered under the auspices of the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS). From its inception in 1967 until its untidy demise in the early 1980's, the IAUS provided an intellectually charged environment for the advancement of architectural criticism and theory and Oppositions was the organ through which much of this fer ment was disseminated. Several of the IAUS »Forums« are documented in the early issues of Oppositions, the photographs vividly capturing the protagonists of the 1970's New York architectural milieu ranging from the timeless presence of Philip Johnson to the (then) very young Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas. If the archi tects of the »1968« generation were already making themselves known, they were complemented by both the presence of an older generation of scholars such as Vin cent Scully and Alan Colquhoun and such committed modernists as Peter Smithson and Richard Meier. Guiding this heterogeneous mix and central to both the IAUS and Oppositions were the founding editors Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton and Mario Gondelsonas. With the sixth issue this group expanded to include Anthony Vidier, Kurt W. Forster (as of issue 12) and Diana Agrest (for the final, 26th issue). Although the IAUS published further material including a number of notable exhibi tion catalogues, Oppositions, published from 1973 until 1984, is properly regarded as the institution's legacy to posterity. Oppositions demanded the interest of not only architects and architectural theorists but also architectural historians, the journal having been organized under headings including those of »History« and »Documents«. »History« featured arti cles by such respected historians and critics as
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer
German Studies Review, 1994
A history of modem architecture can follow two distinct paths. First is the path of the object: an analysis of the historical origins of the things and events themselves. Second is the path of the subject: an analysis of the more intangible and shifting historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand objects and events. This study analyzes the reciprocity of subject/object relations in modern architecture. Subjectivity constitutes the categories of possible experience, objectivity is what is experienced; and architecture resides in the both domains. The particular dialectic of subject and object treated here is that which emerges in the buildings, projects, and writings of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, each of whom, in different ways, brings himself face-to-face with the threatening problems posed by modernity to bourgeois humanism and the sovereignty of its modes of artistic production and reception. My thesis is that a perceptual shift, which I call posthumanism, can be detected within the work of these figures. Posthumanism is the consciousness and conscious response, whether with applause, resignation, or regret. to the threatened norm of psychological autonomomy and individualism. Each of these architects produced a body of work that delineates precise social agendas as well as aesthetic preferences and offers architectures that would be adequate to the posthumanist social orders envisioned. The study draws on established and emergent analyses in critical theory, in particular those of the Frankfurt School and of certain poststructuralist thinkers. It attempts to demonstrate that many of the experiments by these architects previously relegated by the critical-historical establishment to reductive versions of functionalism or Sachlichkeit can be more fruitfully explained within a framework of positions indicative of the changed status of the subject and the ways the subject is variously constituted by the different architectures.
Is here considered the influence of the French Theory on the architectural periodicals " Oppositions " and " Assemblage " during the period between Seventies and Nineties; the wide presence of philosophical theories, without being a guarantor for the discipline, is a sign of the increasing consciousness of its own possibilities. From the critic of the Modern Movement and of its legacy to a form of promotion of new studies on the nature of language based on the structural method, French Theory was theoretical set of ideas that have informed architectural debate. The importance of theory increase, changed and posed itself out of the field of critic and history, more and more often until the debate became a mirror in which architecture gazes at itself. The aim of this work is to analyse the nature, the role and the purpose that a philosophical theory may have in the architectural discourse via the periodicals, peculiar objects in their typical brief life, in their close relationship with what is happening in design practice. In particular, I will consider the debate that the influences of European (or Continental) philosophical context originated, during the Seventies and Nineties on the intellectual milieu that gravitated around the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (1967-1984), in particular in its main publication " Oppositions " (1973-1984) and on the editorial board of its ideal successor Assemblage (1986-2000). Doing this, I do not want to defend the position that philosophical theories are, in these decades, an essential and necessary part of the architects' work or that a theoretical consciousness is characteristic of the contemporary architectural practice: that statements hide the intention that theoretical thought may play as a guarantor for the quality (whatever it is) of architecture itself or of its design, but the issue that in these periodicals took place the increasing consciousness of its own possibilities, with particular regard to the separations between the tasks of criticism and theory. Because of the importance of a building rarely emerges in its only pure presence, theoretical processes take place (and form) before and after the design and the construction of the building itself, and need specific intellectual and methodological tools. To consider the nature, the role and the purpose that theories may have had in contemporary architectural discourse, we necessarily have to start from the place of research and development of that relationship: places of production, of reception, of critique and criticism, of use, of sharing and spreading. In the last decades we
Architecture, Critique, Ideology: Writings on Architecture and Theory
x architecture, critique, ideology an articulating, in both cases, without specifying in advance, from an a priori position, what this must look like: the filling in of the blank left by the conjunction must be the result of a specific invention, in which the conjoining neither begins from the solidity of an a priori, nor ends with a fixity laying claim to have removed the unease associated with the position of theory.
Oase, 2006
Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in its usefulness, in making its object available to just response.' We are now emerging from a hyper-theorised, hyper-eritical episode in architecture. Whether you call it deconstruction, postmodernism, or some other thing, it was a period when architectural discourse and academe spun off on a self-referential tangent that often seemed to bear little relation to architectural practice. This was a moment dominated by North American academics and schools of thought, and Diane Ghirardo has described the years between 1970 and 2000 as 'three decades of theoretical delirium in which poeticising reflection passed for theory ... thirty years of trying on and discarding borrowed theories with all the rapidity of a commodified consumer at an outlet sale'. 2 Within all this, it seems fair to say that the influence of Peter Eisenman was ever-present. For him, architecture was (and indeed continues to be) inextricably tied to philosophy via deconstruction, and inextricably tied to criticism through the concepts of autonomy and resistance. He argues that there is a 'possible inherent criticality that is unique to architecture', where 'criticality can be understood as the striving or the will to perform or manifest architecture's outonorny'." Eisenman's concern is nothing less than the 'survival of the discipline' of architecture per se. Such criticism embodies a resistance to or a negation of commodity culture, and is thus the late inheritor of a Marxist-inflected, Frankfurt-school cultural critique. During the height of this time, the prefix 'critical' took on a talismanic character; employed as a kind of charm, it was used to both preempt and ward off a whole range of (sometimes contradictory) accusations: of commodification, of irrelevance, of empty formal experimentation, of the submission to spectacle and fashion, and so on. But if this oncedominant position can be described as 'criticality' (or 'critical architecture', these terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay), it has been explicitly challenged, in recent years, by the new guard of the 'post-eritical'. Now that the tide of high theory has passed, and criticality has been left desiccated, high on the salty shores of architectural discourse, it is the post-critical that has come scuttling forth to scavenge, and to take its place. In the present furore that surrounds this new, post-eritical condition, it is possible to observe several important confusions about what the 'post-eritical' might actually be, and what it might mean. It is at once a generational wrangle among American