Mario Gandelsonas interviews Diana Agrest
MG: I would like to ask you two sets of questions in relation to the theoretical strategies deployed in your practice of architecture. The first ‘within’ architecture, the second ‘without’ architecture.
Within Architecture
How did you enter the realm of theoretical work and what was your object of criticism?
DA: Theoretical work cannot be separated from practice in my case. I say this because it is from the shortcomings and crisis of architectural practice I encountered after graduating from school that I ‘entered’ the realm of theory or theoretical work, with almost no transition.
I was searching for answers to new questions that I posed for myself and confronting the available models, in particular those proposed for the city and urban architecture (such as the Japanese Metabolists, and the English Team 10 and Archigram).
This critical/theoretical work led me to the criticism of functionalist ideology and modernist urbanism. As a result of the articulation of theory and practice within this problematic system a reversal of scales of influence took place. Instead of thinking from the building—the small scale—to the city—the larger scale—as is traditionally the case, I started thinking from the city to architecture. Certain notions were instrumental in this operation, in particular the question of public place. This notion was not conceived of in a sentimental, picturesque way, but rather within the scope of the question of communication and culture with and against the ever-growing development of the non-place of nonmaterial communication, what is more commonly known now as ‘cyberspace.’
MG: From the beginning, your practice took different forms and developed in different spaces. Where and how was this critical practice implemented? What were the critical notions developed in this process? How do they relate to your practice?
DA: I developed my work in three parallel discourses and practices, the pedagogical (teaching), the theoretical (writing), and the practice (design, drawing, building).
In teaching both at Princeton University and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, starting in 1974, I developed an approach in which design started from a reading of the city, more specifically, of parts of the city where the relationship between building and public place could be seen
The city was recreated, redesigned through the reading that became the first step in the process of formal production. The split between theory and practice was erased, the boundaries separating these two modes were blurred. An important concept underlying this approach is that of the impossible gap that exists between the omnipotent logocentric, anthropocentric, (male) architectural subject and the social historical conditions within which the practice is developed. In this readinga radical critique of the architectural subject is performed, and its position is transformed creating the conditions for a different articulation between subject and history.
Starting from the city as a constant production and transformation of form, as an open text, as a complex intertextual relationship outside the books of architecture, the question of style that encloses the architectural discourse for easy consumption was avoided from the start.
These issues were explored in theory, particularly in the ‘Design versus Non-Design’ essay (1972-75) where the position of architecture in culture and in relation to the city was moved from a privileged position to an equal one, in relation to other cultural systems. In this repositioning, an opening is created and the architect is placed in the position of the reader. Another essay important in this context is the ‘Misfortunes of Theory,’ where the reciprocal ideological influences of the discourses of urbanism, planning, and architecture were explored as leading architecture to the loss of its own object, which in fact is the problematic concept that led me to theory and criticism.
The mode of articulation of these discourses in relation to practice is not always conscious, as an application, and they do not always relate in a linear before-and-after fashion. In the project for Roosevelt Island, for example, we can see the reading of Manhattan’s juxtaposition between high-rise and low-rise structures. But project, the public domain permeates through our entire project, not as a neutral field as in modernist urbanism, but as an articulation of places where the transitions between public and private become essential. This is not done in a nostalgic manner trying to emulate the historical European city but as a way to inspect the specificity of the
American city.
The repetition of the towers can be related to issues explored, for instance, in my essay ‘Architectural Anagrams,’ where the question of the symbolic performance of the skyscraper is inspected by questioning its symbolic role as a single object in the city, by seeing it in its relationship of ‘value,’ a syntagmatic relationship, with other skyscrapers in Manhattan.
In a small-scale project like ‘Les Echelles,’ the house is a double object; it may become a public place, a stage for performance independent from the interior private domain, while at the same time there can be a constant interface between the inside and outside. The architecture here is not only conceptually affected by the urban but is also articulated with other cultural systems.
MG: How does the wide range of practices (from interiors to large-scale projects) affect the making of architecture?
DA: Intervention at many different scales is in the tradition of architecture, clearly in modern architecture in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe.
I consider them different ‘scenes’ in the architectural drama. Following the question of the city, I would say that this even affects the interiors, which are, for the most part, ‘urban.’ This happens in two ways: on the one hand, urban notions such as transition, sequence, and place are present in the interiors; on the other hand, these interiors can be seen as an interface between the city and the private realm. They occur behind the mask of the building’s facade. One could say that this is the architectural reality of the city, a fabric and a world behind it. This is very clear in the Central Park West apartment interior where there is a sequence from park front to interior of a typical Upper West Side Manhattan block. This is reordered in the series of openings from the open park views to the fragmented, more fabric-like views through interior openings.
The organization of the interior is also affected by the notion of sequence and framing that comes from my work on the city and film, among other things. In relation to these questions, the nature of interior spaces such as that of ‘room’ versus open plan are explored both in plan and section.
The interior also allows for the focusing on materiality and visuality, on the projections of desires and of the body, through the material realization of the place: materials that one can touch or caress, that reflect, mirroring city and subject at once, mechanisms that regulate the screening or exposure of the body. Of course some of these issues appear in the houses and/or the buildings.
The buildings, residential for the most part, are the result of the articulation of city and architecture, a building in the city is more than itself and also less than itself. This is exemplified in Buildings 1, 2, 3 and 4 designed as ‘two buildings’ or ‘three buildings’ or ‘one building in front of the other.’ In Manhattan Additions 1 and 2, buildings are made of urban fragments addressing different aspects of the city and of a building in the city. In these, some of the notions explored in ‘Architectural Anagrams,’ such as the tripartite organization of the skyscraper, reappear. Each of these scales of intervention affect each other. The architecture is not seen as a subjective, ‘expressive,’ freestanding fetishistic object, but as the place of intersection of all the forces that traverse architecture and the creative subject.
MG: Why is your practice of urbanism (and your large-scale projects) focused on the American city?
DA: Although we have designed a number of urban projects for European cities, the referent, if not the focus, of our urban work is the American city.
The American city is the modern city in its origins and in its development towards the negation or restructuring of an urban order. The American city is in fact the product of the Cartesian order claimed by Le Corbusier in his urban projects. Most American cities were developed by layering abstract grids of circulation on virgin land, on a ‘neutral green.’ And if not originally founded that way, their subsequent developments take the form of the grid, e.g., Manhattan’s development according to the 1811 gridiron. From a building point of view, the type par excellence of the modern city—the skyscraper—is also American. One could say that the morphology and typology of the modern city are fundamentally American while the vocabulary of modernist urbanism developed in Europe. The transformation of the city with the changes in capitalism can also be best seen in the American city, in its conflict between the urban, the suburban, and the exurban.
MG: How do you see the relationship between style and architecture?
DA: Style is the way in which a critical practice, by its reduction to fetishism, gets absorbed into pure consumption.
Each project represents a certain exploration in which forms are developed in a consistent way. While there is a certain continuity or familiarity in the formal development of projects, we cannot call it a ‘style’; actually it is a plus when a project cannot be easily classified stylistically. I would even leave out the term ‘postmodern,’ since this covers just about everything and reduction to stylistic naming seems quite banal. We could say that postmodernism starts after WWII, more specifically in the fifties, with cultural and technological changes, the development of communications and cybernetics infiltrating every level of life as mass culture and mass media within which any juxtaposition, no matter how odd, is possible.
When starting from a reading of the city as a generator in the process of production of architecture, the question of style is avoided. The city generates formal configurations of its own that do not belong in the books of architecture. We could speak of a textual architecture, rather than one of books, that is open, not necessarily consistent or unified. This is what architecture as readingand rewriting the city is about. The city itself (particularly the American city) as an apparent reality has no unity, closure, consistency, and is beyond style. An architecture that is generated by an urban reading should transcend the limitation of stylistic boundaries. This is not the same as eclecticism, which, again, is not of text but of books; it is within style and not beyond it.
Without Architecture
MG: How have the notions developed in your theoretical critical practice reshaped the fields of architecture and urbanism and their relationship in your practice? How do these notions affect the understanding of the ideology of modernist urbanism?
DA: The question of urbanism and its relationship to architecture transcends the specificity of the city as locus. We live in an urban culture and therefore everything we do is filtered through it, whether consciously or unconsciously. The city, however, has certain configurational characteristics that make various possible settings for architecture. In this respect the question of fabric and object is a major one in defining different historical and ideological modes of addressing the formal relationship between architecture and the city and between architecture and urbanism.
These two conditions—fabric and object—have been seen since the turn of the century as opposites, until now. The city was seen either as a continuous fabric with public places and monuments, such as the historical city, or as a collection of objects—freestanding buildings—with no public places, as in the modernist city.
Our understanding of this relationship has been at the core of the urban projects we present in this book—fabric and object acting upon each other, not as opposites. Rather than repeating an ideological opposition, we propose condensations and displacements, producing new and more powerful notions to deal with the new conditions of the contemporary city. In working with these notions we have replaced the or by as. We say object as fabric—this can be seen in the projects for Roosevelt Island, Minneapolis, Park Square, etc.—or fabric as object—in the Goose Island ‘urban ready-mades,’ and in the Des Moines residential neighborhood of Hillside.
This is also a way to bring the question of nature back into the urban discourse, which has been absent from it for the past forty years, and establish a more dialectical critical relationship between the principles (and projects) of modernist urbanism. It was at this time that the city entered the realm of architecture as part of its discourse.
The question of the relationship between the ideologies of architecture, urbanism, and planning is essential in my view to understand the crisis of architecture that was most obvious about thirty years ago and that led to the development of the postmodern condition in architecture.
MG: How does the city as the unconscious of architecture affect the practice of architecture?
DA: The first time I used the statement ‘the city is the unconscious of architecture’ was in the essay ‘Design versus Non-Design.’ In that context I developed the notion of placing the architect in the position of the reader. The architect as a reader is a detective or a psychoanalyst bringing the not readily apparent configurations and symbolic performances that affect us all at a conscious level. This was later developed as a teaching method that I have now been applying for many years. There are myriads of possible formal conditions that the city develops outside architecture with it or without it—an open text for us to read. The architect reads and rewrites this text. The focus of this reading in my theoretical approach and in the projects has, for the most part, been the public place, the field of maximum cultural identity and intersections, the places that make a city urban, and not just a collection of objects. The subject reading and rewriting engages and articulates him/herself with history.
Diana Agrest interviews Mario Gandelsonas
DA: What is the position of critical theory in architectural discourse today?
MG: In order to answer your question | need to start by describing the role of critical theory in our work as a response to the paradoxical social conditions of the contemporary practice of architecture. While our society continued to value architecture (ideologically) throughout the twentieth century, it rendered its craft, its principles, and its values impossible to realize (pragmatically).
This contradiction has been reflected in the work of the architectural avant-garde since the sixties with the acknowledgment of the impossibility of architecture, the loss of its object through different modes of disappearance of the architectural building, which is repeating now as another form of the same avant-gardism. This contradiction is also reflected through its denial in the work of the other side of the avant-gardist position, the traditionalist position that promotes the absurd notion of a return to past convention.
For me, starting from our earliest work, the issue has been to focus on the conditions for the survival of architecture through the redefinition of the role of critical theory and its relationship to practice, and the need to confront and deal with past conventions rather than suppress them, that is, to confront
architectural ideology and reinstate the urban question. In this space of confrontation, critical theory finds its place in architecture.
The importance and relevance of critical theory lies more in its power to transform ideology than in its capacity to ‘explain.’ And with that I mean not just the conscious but also and fundamentally the ‘unconscious’ of ideology. The role of critical theory has not changed. Besides, it is still the indispensable mechanism of surveillance of the economic/political/cultural conditions of architecture.
It is actually the ‘outside’ that has provided the most potent tools and strategies, starting with the possibility of a theoretical production given by the displacement towards the semiotic and textual critical work in the late sixties
and early seventies—Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida. These tools have allowed criticism of both an architecture that tends towards formalism and fetishism (because of the suppression of the city) and a conservative architecture nostalgic of the past (because of the suppression of history).
DA: What are the tasks of a critical theory today?
MG: I see two major tasks for a critical theory today. First, it needs to unmask an ideology structured as an opposition between avant-gardism and traditionalism as two sides of the same coin/Möbius band, an alternation that obscures the fact that they are two faces of the same ideology.
Second, if the question of theory was the issue in the seventies, the battle for the political and social connection is the issue now. Architecture needs to claim the city and criticize a production of fetishistic objects refusing to confront it.
A critical theoretical practice today should confront an architecture that tends towards formalism, because of the suppression of politics; towards fetishism, because of the suppression of the city; and towards nostalgia, because of the suppression of history.
DA: Is there still room for a critical practice?
MG: I believe that the notion of a critical practice best defines our work. Critical practice is a conception of architecture that opposes the notion of the autonomy of architectural theory, a discourse disconnected from the practice of architecture.
It is an overdetermined notion that persists in our work after all these years as a mechanism that allows the resonance of the discursive theoretical practice in the production of design, and its articulation to a particular historical conjuncture. In other terms, it is a mechanism that provides both internal and external surveillance of the logic of development of a project as well as the political and ideological implications within and without architecture.
DA: Do the political-historical events in the recent past and the present state of changing economic forces in the world have an impact on architectural discourse and practice?
MG: The recent transformations of the global map, where political frontiers have been radically transformed, are redefining the role of cities and states. The fragmentation of the socialist world, and the resurgence of the nation-states in Eastern Europe, parallels the erasure of the economic boundaries in western Europe. Some walls have fallen (Berlin), while new conservative walls are being built menacing the fragmentation of the nation-states.
The other side of the instability of boundaries is the resurgence of the city in different and contradictory directions: a conservative regression to medieval city-states reviving their role as war machines (Sarajevo); a progressive movement towards a network of city nodes where the flow of informational and economic global processes intersect. The cities still have the role of economic dynamos. However, the dynamos have radically changed.
A new global city that functions both in cyberspace and as a physical city, and therefore a new object for architecture and urbanism, has emerged. Finally, the present economic restructuring will certainly have an impact in the practice of architecture, which will also be restructured.
DA: A number of years ago, we started developing theoretical critical work related to the need for criticism of inherited ideologies as they related to the overall structure of society; a major figure in our work was Louis Althusser. Has this need disappeared? Has it changed, has it transformed?
MG: The early years of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies were the years of the most intense production of critical theory. | proposed ‘Oppositions’ as the name for the magazine to convey the sense that its pages were meant to be a place where the ideological struggle would take place. This gesture was definitely influenced by Althusser's writings.
Our work started at a point in time that was ineradicably marked by Althusser, as Jacques Derrida said, ‘by what he searched for, experimented with, and risked at the highest price.’ This is crucial for critical work because ‘in thought . . . one must run risks, otherwise there is no responsibility.’ What became most relevant for our work was the notion that theory could be transformed into a ‘revolutionary practice’—the practice of the avant-garde—within architecture and urbanism. In addition, the notion of ‘critique,’ which is the core of our critical practice, is not only an essential motif in Althusser’s discourse and project, but also an indispensable notion for our practice today. The ongoing interest and the continuing vitality of the intellectual tradition associated with his writings on both sides of the Atlantic reminds us of the relevance and pertinence of his work for our time.
DA: Is there a real avant-garde? What would an avant-garde be now?
MG: We need to differentiate avant-garde from the avant-gardism I mentioned above. We also need to criticize the notion of an official architectural avant-garde.
A history of painting—where Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists represent a separate nonlinear development from the Paul Cézanne/Pablo Picasso lineage that moves from impressionism to abstraction via cubism—is being rewritten. This other development has always been the remainder of the official history of the avant-garde. The problem for historians now is to show that there are not two histories—the official line and a remainder—that half the facts cannot be suppressed for the sake of the internal consistency of the historical narrative.
While the official line in painting (pre- and post-cubist) reverberates in architecture through modernism (promoted by Sigfried Giedion and Colin Rowe), there are also architectures that develop beside the modernist lineage—Adolf Loos, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi—and since the seventies, what we designate as a radical critical practice on architecture, where we include our work.
DA: How is Duchamp important in the development of critical work in theory and/or in practice?
MG: First, in our theoretical work, Duchamp’s position has been helpful for a reflection on the question of the avant-garde today inasmuch as it clarifies the question of avant-gardism as the other side of the conservative movements of architecture in the twentieth century, and opens up the possibility of another avant-garde.
Second, in our practice not only Duchamp’s notion of tabula rasa and its connection to the notion of ready-made, but also his break from the exclusiveoptical conception of painting and the reintroduction of the questions of language,text, the body and desire, are crucial for our conception of an urban architecture, and for the implications that they bring into the practice of architecture.
In our work the critique on the notion of tabula rasa is performed through the notion of writing as a form of reading, which brings up the question of the previous text. This notion, which is present in every one of our projects, acquires particular relevance in the urban projects.
The ready-made appears in different forms, from objects, such as the pantry door in the Central Park West interior, to urban projects, such as the Goose Island, Chicago, Illinois master plan.
The break from a purely optical conception of architecture is also very important in our work since it is developed through several texts, in which the written text acquires particular importance not only in themselves but in their reverberations with the optical and in their mutual dependency.
DA: Is the role of the city now equivalent to that of architecture in the past? Or, what is the place of urban discourse in relation to an architectural discourse? What is the role of architectural discourse in relation to an urban discourse?
MG: The city has been the object of architectural desire from the moment architectural discourse was established. As such, it has always eluded the architect; it has always been unreachable. In its pursuit of the city, architecture can only approach the city, ‘it never gets there.’ It is too slow or too fast; it rebuilds the past or projects the future, but it can never set itself in the present.
The city as the object of architectural desire is supposed to fulfill a fundamental lack in architecture, always focused on the building as object. As you said, ‘From the position of architecture as a critical practice, the city looks at architecture from without. It is beside, beyond its field of vision, something that, in looking back at architecture, constantly redefines it, again and again through history: in the baroque, in the enlightenment, at the beginning of the twentieth century with modernism, and now again with the radical restructuring brought by the global and informational city. The movement of the choreographyof desire flows back and forth from architecture to the city, from the architectural to the non-architectural, and then back from the city to architecture.’
It is important to note that to view architecture from without is not necessary to ‘stay’ outside, but beside—to find the strategies that will allow discourse to confront and break apart from the conservative historical forces expressed in the compulsive repetition or in the violent denial of history.
DA: How do you see the American city? Is it mutating? In which way?
MG: From the beginning, the American city was founded with a specific formal structure. Since the independence of the United States, the American city, as the physical support of democratic and capitalist systems, has developed with a unique formal/symbolic character. A mapping strategy based on the colossal scale of the Jeffersonian one-mile grid covers the territory west of the Appalachians, creating the conditions for a ‘continental city.’
This city includes not only the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century dense and continuous city-of-fabric but also other species of cities, such as the pre- and post-Second World War suburban cities, the late twentieth-century city-of-objects, and now the exurban edge cities. Maybe all of these apparently new forms are perceived as new because they are not yet consolidated as cities, but rather appear as very young urban formations of which the more mature forms are yet unknown.
We are at a point where some crucial decisions need to be taken in relation to the urban geography created since the second half of the twentieth century. Besides the political and economic problems inherent to democracy and capitalism that, without any doubt, affect our cities, there are issues concerning how/what we produce, exchange, and consume, how/where we live, move, and use our free time, etc.
The American city is one of the most vibrant laboratories that propose and answer these questions.
DA: How do you see the relationship between image and style in the development of a critical practice?
MG: I would define that relationship with two questions: first, the question of the image in terms of the reduction of architecture to an exclusive imaginary dimension; second, the question of style in terms of the figural and discursive coding of architecture that makes possible its circulation and consumption, which is another form of reduction.
The confinement of architecture to an imaginary scene is the inevitable result of the flow and exchange of shapes and images that circulate in the architectural scene. However, there is another scene, structured by unconscious forces and desires and traversed by political and social forces, where the symbolic dimension of architecture is played. One of the paradigmatic places that constitutes this scene is the city, the other of architecture.
The emergence and appearance of the symbolic scene in the imaginary scene tends to confuse, slow down, or even block the successful flow, exchange, and consumption of images required by the practice of architecture.
The notion of style represents another form of reduction that obliterates the textual dimension of architecture to coded, recognizable configurations, to stereotyped representations. Style facilitates the circulation of images, their instantaneous, uncritical visual consumption. A critical practice presupposes a form of visual resistance (to instant consumption) that initiates a process of reading and writing the architectural text. The notion of style does not have a place in our practice. Our buildings are neither modernist nor classical; they resist stylistic categorizations.
DA: What do you see as a formal strategy that would be anchored on a relationship between theory and practice?
MG: The most important formal strategy in our work is reading as a form of writing.
The tactics that implement this strategy are based on the deployment of a multiplicity of displacements:
The displacement of the reading apparatus—as in the filmic reading proposed in your article ‘Design versus Non-Design,’ with the implications of the establishment of sequences and the reintroduction of the text—and the displacement of critical theory within the practice as a surveillance mechanism that resists stereotype and styling.
The displacement of the object of reading, when reading the American city as architecture, where the city acts as a formal generator, as both a lexical and syntactic reservoir of architectural configurations and forms.
The displacement of the writing apparatus, in our latest experiments with computer/video. The displacement of the object of writing, in the simultaneous work contrasting scales from that of furniture to the colossal scale of the metropolis.