Journal Review: Oppositions (original) (raw)
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
En una de sus conferencias, Quetglas resaltaba que existen dos tipos de arquitectos; aquellos a los que les gusta la crítica y aquellos a los que no, y se dedican a proyectar. Su reflexión manifiesta la posición distante de estas dos prácticas: la construcción del pensamiento arquitectónico frente a la elaboración del proyecto. Sin embargo, ¿porqué no enfrentarse a la investigación como arquitectos pensadores y proyectistas simultáneamente? Más que limitarse a exponer el estado de cierto campo epistémico, estudiarlo y describirlo, se tomará el ámbito de la investigación como lugar de exploración, descubrimiento y aprendizaje extrapolable. Investigar como se aborda un proyecto de Arquitectura, donde el trabajo resulta delemergentismo propiciado por el propio método, siendo este suficientemente abierto, a la vez que específico de cada situación, como para generar dinámicas no únicamente expositivas sino también productivas. Desde el mayo 68 parisino, se pone en práctica el dibujamiento (dibujo como forma de pensamiento) para llegar al modelo performativo como método investigador. A través de este, se auna la estructura disidente de la revuelta, entendida desde el estudio de las relaciones afectivas existentes en el espacio físico-imaginario, y las formas en que estas se materializan en la ciudad. Sirviéndose no sólo de fuentes bibliográficas, sino de situaciones y entornos físicos, se genera un material coproductivo y voluble, un modelo, entendido como lo hace Eliasson, que permite abordar el escenario relacional y complejo de la revuelta parisina. Una suerte de cartografía diagramática, inacabada y potencial, permite construir y extrapolar situaciones a través de ella, vislumbrando un estado de la cuestión que enriquece la estructura del trabajo y articula el pensamiento proyectual con el rigor investigador. Experiencia y acción trascienden al trabajo investigador. Producir, como investigadores, instrumentos para afrontar el cosmos desde la perspectiva arquitectónica. Generar vínculos entre la sociedad y la universidad. Así, la investigación no deberá deslindarse de la acción. Esta, realizada en el medio de lo social revierte en la ciudad, y por tanto en el espacio arquitectónico, por lo que el caso del París del 68 se extrapola en un contexto contemporáneo a las problemáticas espaciales de la actualidad.