Anthony Vidler

Book review: Architecture between spectacle and use (2011)

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Berrin Chatzi Chousein
(edited by Ross Wolfe)
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Berrin Chatzi Chousein contacted me about a week ago inquiring if I’d be interested in publishing her review of Architecture between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler, on The Charnel-House. Glancing over it just superficially, I could immediately tell it pertained to the blog’s focus and broader statement of intent. Though it was a bit rough in parts, I edited it down into its present form, appearing here for the first time.

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Architecture between Spectacle and Use, a collection edited by Anthony Vidler,[1] focuses on the concepts of “spectacle” and “use” as they appear in many recent international projects and designs. It evaluates their role by situating within a broader historical context, moving on from there to consider current examples. As its title suggests, the book’s essays examine the condition of contemporary architecture in terms of factors such as “usage” and “display.” The book advances a comprehensive criticism of prevalent architectural tendencies today, going over specific examples and approaching them from different angles. In so doing, it focuses on the various contexts in which spectacle and use relate. This review primarily assesses the relationship between spectacle and use and different approaches appraised within different contents and submits a certain role of criticism about the theme of the book.

In the introduction, Vidler starts the discussion by evaluating Hal Foster’s critique of the “spectacular” Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry. Foster clarifies by indicating that “spectacle is an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital,”[2] Vidler continues by citing Hal Foster’s position on contemporary architecture. He makes three general comments on Foster’s critical framework. First, he draws a comparison between Frank Loyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum. He adds that although Wright’s Manhattan Guggenheim has a formal logic based on programmatic considerations, Gehry’s museum mostly serves as a tourist attraction.[3] Secondly, Vidler mentions not only Foster’s criticisms of the “Bilbao effect” associated with Gehry, but also his criticisms of other master architects like Rem Koolhaas. Vidler’s third major point regards the way Foster approaches architecture in terms of expression. This leads Foster to characterize it in vague, underspecified terms such as “the sublime,” “the baroque,” etc.[4] The most important thing for Vidler about Foster’s critique is its emphasis on the way in which images directly serve the market economy and the limits this imposes on architects in design process, especially given their responsibility to the public.

Though Vidler explicitly criticizes some of the terms Foster uses to conduct his analysis, he implicitly reaffirms Foster’s centrality to the discussion. He accepts that architectural images are designed according to the demands of consumer society. But at the same time, he also explores some of the incidental benefits that accrue to contemporary architecture even if it has become “identical” to this society of consumption. Vidler begins by quoting the Situationist critic Guy Debord:

The problem of architecture is not to be seen from outside, nor to live inside. It is in the dialectical relationship interior and exterior, at the scale of urbanism (houses-streets) and at the scale of the house (interior-exterior).[5]

Working from this passage, Vidler explores some of the relationships that exist for Debord between an architectural “image” and its public “context.” Continue reading →

Architecture in revolutionary times

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Parallels after Emil Kaufmann

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Image: “Le Corbusier in Boullée” by Romeo D’Orazi

Determining the relation of architecture to revolution clearly depends in no small measure on how these terms are defined. Before revisiting this familiar counterposition, however, it is worth noting that revolutionary politics makes up only one part of politics proper. Even if one were to grant architecture some kind of inbuilt political status, this by no means guarantees the politics it embodies are of the revolutionary variety. Architecture can for instance be politically reformist in character, as in Ernst May’s Neue Frankfurt settlement or Walter Gropius’ Törten district outside Dessau, Karl Ehn’s iconic Karl Marx-Hof block in Red Vienna, and JJP Oud’s Spangen/Kiefhoek estates in Rotterdam.[1] In the last few decades, critical regionalists such as Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Lilliane Lefaivre have likewise spoken of “an architecture of resistance,” understood as “a cultural density which under today’s conditions could be said to be potentially liberative in and of itself.”[2] Despite its many outspoken adherents, practical examples of critical regionalism are harder to come by than those associated with interwar Sozialpolitik.[3] Most of the time it’s tended to emerge alongside movements struggling for autonomy against neoliberal integration, as in Catalonia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics during the ’70s and ’80s. But objections have been raised even on purely theoretical grounds.[4]

So much for the architectures of resistance and reform. Is there, then, an architecture of revolution? Certainly, some have made the case that there is. Foremost among them is the Viennese art historian, Emil Kaufmann, who in his 1952 study Three Revolutionary Architects: Boulée, Ledoux, and Lequeu described these most radical bourgeois architects of the French Enlightenment as “men imbued with the great new ideals set forth by the leading thinkers of the century [who] strove, unconsciously rather than intentionally, to express these ideals in their own medium.”[5] Though the actual basis for this correlation is never spelled out in detail, inferred from a shared emphasis on the idea of “autonomy,”[6] Kaufmann’s chief merit consists in precisely this intuition of a nonsensuous similarity between the philosophic and architectonic modes of its expression. At times he came close to discerning its sociopolitical root. “Having lived in the atmosphere of growing political and social discontent,” Kaufmann wrote, “the revolutionary architects wished to realize, for the common good, the ideals of the time by contriving architectural schemes such as had never existed before.”[7]

Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Monument to the revolution (1791)

Two aspects of Kaufmann’s classic account of revolutionary architecture deserve to be mentioned. First, there is the procedure he adopts in attempting to situate architecture and revolution. Rather than assume direct correspondence between them, either according to a linear model of cause and effect or a reciprocal model of mutual causation and effectuation, Kaufmann suggested a more circuitous and indirect link. In other words, architecture neither brings about revolution by itself nor prevents it from coming about, and vice versa. Still less could the matter be resolved simply by asserting that they simultaneously codetermine one another. Kaufmann instead contended the apparent isomorphism of moral and architectural conceptions of autonomy during this period arose out of their common participation in its revolutionary Zeitgeist.[8] A materialist would only add that this radical spirit of innovation he perceived was but the ideological reflection of real historical dynamics. Continue reading →