At Home with His Parents

Author(s): Beatriz Colomina and Lauren Kogod

Source: Assemblage , Aug., 1996, No. 30 (Aug., 1996), pp. 108-112
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171460

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 re:assernblage

At Home with His Parents it. So we couldn't have thought of it.) In- number 0, you know?" He knew, and
stead, we did this journal. I guess it was a that was the end of that. More recently, I
In Barcelona, in the late 1970s, some
way to deal with that exuberant excess of walked into Avery Library to do some last-
friends and I used to do a little architec-
energy that you feel in your twenties - minute slides for a lecture and found a stu-
tural journal. It was called Carrer de la
when you never want to go to sleep. So we dent hovering over some issues of Carrer
ciutat. All we had was a typewriter, not the
would stay up the whole night arguing de la ciutat in preparation for a seminar
electric kind where you can at least correct
about this and that, typing away, gluing. presentation at Columbia University. It
mistakes, but an old heavy Olivetti. Every
Or we would drive through the night, on a made me realize, almost to the point of
time you made a mistake you had to do the
last-minute impulse, all the way to Venice shock, that the journal is now history. A
whole thing again. We typed everything in
(some fourteen hours away at considerable part of my youth has become the archive
vertical strips, ragged on the right, as in a
speed) to hear Manfredo Tafuri deliver his of a different moment in the discourse. In
newspaper, reduced them on a Xerox ma-
fortnightly lectures at the Istituto the next fact, the student was comparing our jour-
chine, and then glued the strips and the im-
day and to buy books at CLUVA, the coop- nal with that of a much more established
ages to some boards and sent them to the
erative of the school. We did the journal ingeneration in the Barcelona of those years:
printers. We did all of this in some closet
the same frenetic spirit we had once foughtOriol Bohigas, Federico Correa, Rafael
space borrowed from the department of ar-
the dictatorship. (Franco died in November Moneo, Helio Pifion, and Manuel de Sola-
chitectural history, where Jose Quetglas, the
of 1975, leaving a generation that had goneMorales, among others. Arquitecturas bis
leader of our group, was teaching. We were
through the university thinking that demon-was Barcelona's equivalent of Oppositions.
all scattered through different departments
strations were part of the curriculum with a In fact, they shared authors, exchanged
of the School of Architecture, teaching in
lot of free time on their hands.) The journalarticles, and eagerly reported on each
history, urbanism, design, composition, and
came out more or less regularly for about other. Carrer de la ciutat only had eyes for
aesthetics. In retrospect, I can see that all
four years and then suddenly, in the fall of Venice. We had different eyes and the stu-
we had in common as a group was that we
1980, it stopped. By chance, it happened to dent (who turned out to be Bohigas's son!)
were all crazy, certifiably so, but we did not
be the very moment in which I moved to was analyzing the differences.
know this at the time. And it was just as well
New York and to new things. I did not think
because there was no psychoanalysis in Much of the history of architecture is a
about it for a long time.
Barcelona, and no Prozac. (Of course, there family history, with its rival generations,
must have been analysis, but not in the A few years ago, Peter Eisenman (a collec-incestuous relationships, long-kept secrets,
same way that it is understood in New York.tor of little magazines) called to verify thatinheritances, resentments, jealousies, and
Nobody that we knew, nobody that was he had a complete set. "Yes, number 12 a multitude of deep-set pathologies. I was
vaguely functioning in society, made use ofwas the last issue," I said, "and there was a reminded of all of this when reading Greg

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Lynn's pseudoreview of the colloquium
Origins of the Avant-garde in America.
Lynn is clearly upset about the Light Con-
struction show at MoMA last fall, and the
kind of architecture that it represented.
That much is clear from his very confused
account. But why does he use the sympo-
sium as the occasion to vent his grievances
instead of a review of the exhibition itself,
and why does he choose Assemblage as
his venue? (It is important to remind the
reader that the three-day event was orga-
nized by the CCA - not by MoMA - and
held at Columbia University with the ex-
ception of the last morning session.) Lynn
identifies the symposium with MoMA in
order to associate it with the Light Con-
struction show and he does it in Assemblage
because he would like to associate that ar-
chitecture, or rather an extreme stereotype
of it, with certain "poststructuralist" forms
of historical writing. Normally, I would not
have bothered responding to such a weak
argument. The reader is usually perfectly
aware of the unsubtle ruses of ambition.
But when the argument turns on a discus-
sion of statements that were never madey, it
may be worth raising a few issues - not
just to correct the record but to consider
why the reviewer needs to distort it in the
first place. Distortions are usually symp-
toms. But of what in this case?
The most glaring example is when Lynn
claims that I said that few European archi-
tects are "currently interested in or quali-
fied to practice architectural history or
theory because they are too busy building"
and that "few of the architects teaching in
American and Canadian universities are
interested in or qualified to build because
they are concerned with theory alone."
Lynn is referring to an autobiographical
moment in the final roundtable discussion
where, prompted by a question, I went
back to my first year in New York (1980-
129.78.56.136 on Mon, 05 Jul 2021 23:04:49 UTC
re:assemblage
81). By the end of that year, it was clear to
me that I should stay, while my Barcelona
schoolmate, Enric Miralles, who had come
to New York at the same time, on the same
fellowship, had no doubt that he had to go
back. Why this difference? It is difficult for
an architect to build in this country and
Enric, who has always been interested in
history and used to hang around the Carrer
de la ciutat group, really wanted to build. I
did not. I wanted to write. And, as I said in
the discussion, the United States seemed
already a better place for that since it is ac-
tually as difficult to make a good book in
Europe as it is to make a good building in
the States. We were still in our twenties
and Europe trusts a twentysomething to do
a building while the United States trusts a
twentysomething to do a book. Every time
I go back to Barcelona, my schoolmates,
and now my students, take me to see their
libraries, schools, plazas, cemeteries, sta-
dia. Here, we go to exhibitions or book
openings.
Not only does Lynn completely misrepre-
sent what I said (it has nothing to do with
the architects' interests, qualifications, or
time - indeed, the generation that rebuilt
Barcelona in the 1980s is probably one
of the better formed theoretically, given
the strength of history and theory in the
1970s), but further, he claims that it repre-
sents "a cynical and divisive position re-
garding the ability to design without theory
and vice versa." The cynicism here is cer-
tainly not mine. I simply described the dif-
ferent conditions of production on each
side of the Atlantic, conditions that no one
disputed. Or does Lynn think that it is easy
to do a building in the United States? Or
that in the 1980s there was a culture sup-
porting history and theory in Europe?
In fact, 1980-81 was exactly the moment in
which the fertile ground that had fostered
architectural theory in the Europe of the
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1970s was starting to dry out. Tafuri was
withdrawing to the Renaissance and a dif-
ferent kind of historiography, never to
touch the question of the avant-garde again.
In Spain, the publishing house Gustavo
Gili, which had played a crucial role in the
1970s, publishing and translating all the key
theoretical texts (from Aymonino to Ven-
turi), abandoned this in favor of commer-
cial monographs. Arquitecturas bis lingered
on with occasional issues for a few years
while a different kind of journal was emerg-
ing in the form of El Croquis and a revised
Quaderns, journals clearly oriented toward
professional practice. I saw the door of
theory closing. I stayed in New York. There
was still some support in the university. The
school of architecture in Barcelona held my
full-time teaching position for another four
years (while I took leave upon leave) before
giving me the ultimatum. It was 1984. The
picture that I had seen vaguely forming a
few years before was now crystal clear. I did
not go back.
Lynn uses the gross misrepresentation of
my comments to launch his central claim
that research into the historical avant-garde
that seems detached from contemporary
design practices actually supports what are
said to be reactionary forms of "recycled
modernism." In his desperation to establish
that point, the misrepresentations and dis-
tortions proliferate. For example, he imme-
diately identifies the research of myself and
my colleagues as "poststructuralist" and
comes up with the novel idea that "mass
marketing, advertising, mass production,
representation and the construction of con-
sumer subjectivity" are "critical poststruc-
turalist practices" that we unwisely locate
in the historical avant-garde. This is absurd.
Since when is poststructuralism identified
with mass culture? My own influence in
this regard was Walter Benjamin, a con-
temporary of the avant-garde, and I have

never talked about "global late capitalism,"
let alone "consumer subjectivity" as Lynn
insists. Furthermore, the fact that the avant-
garde engaged with the media as a new site
of architectural production is simply a mat-
ter of archival record. While there was
some resistance to acknowledging this
when the research started to be published
around ten years ago, it now seems to be
accepted. Does Lynn have new evidence to
the contrary? Of course not. Nevertheless,
he goes on to faithfully echo the embit-
tered attempts to resist the kind of research
carried out in United States in the 1980s as
being a "historical sleight of hand," "oppor-
tunistic," and so on. It is strange to hear
these sentiments after so many years. In a
moment in which this work is supported by
even the most orthodox of historians and
institutions, it is bizarre to hear a young ar-
chitect reviving the most reactionary for-
mulations. Once again, innuendo is offered
in the place of evidence. Once again, ar-
chitecture is being called on to blind itself
to its own history.
Lynn's blindness seems terminal. He
praises the so-called younger generation
for talking about "minor" and neglected
figures of the avant-garde, "forgotten or
extraneous figures" that were "overlooked
during the modern movement and passed
over by the International Style." But, aston-
ishingly, his first two examples are Giedion
and Neutra. Do we need to comment on
this? Is it possible to even think of the mod-
ern movement without Giedion? And how
about Neutra passed over? Doesn't Lynn
know that Neutra was at the very center of
the International Style exhibition as one of
the "exhibiting architects" together with
Wright, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Oud,
Mies, Hood, Howe & Lescaze, and the
Bowman brothers? If Lynn's review is to
attack the so-called revival of the Interna-
tional Style, wouldn't it be useful to know
what is being revived? Or has a neglect of
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assemblage 30
even the most rudimentary details of the re-
cent past become the basis of the supposed
novelty of one's design's or ideas? Lynn
even repeatedly misspells the name of
Kiesler, his model of a minor architect.
(Kiesler's status is anyway a much more
complicated story, which a number of us
have written about in detail.)
It is precisely this kind of historical igno-
rance that marks the difference between
Lynn, who promotes himself as writer and
designer and the "older" generation of
writer/designers that he pretends to chastise:
Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas. In this
respect, when Lynn places Hays and myself
on the side of Koolhaas and Eisenman, I
have to say that, despite our obvious differ-
ences, I do share their fascination with his-
tory. The modes of the historian and the
designer are, of course, very different. And
it is on this central point that Lynn once
again demonstrates his ignorance. When
describing Koolhaas and Eisenman as si-
multaneously designers and theorists, he
says that "largely due to Manfredo Tafuri's
dismissal of operative criticism, this kind of
joint activity is virtually extinct." This is
nonsense. As is well known, Tafuri was cri-
tiquing historians who align their work with
contemporary design tendencies, using
Giedion as his model. Despite their interest
in history and their endless rereadings of it,
Eisenman and Koolhaas do not present
themselves as historians and nobody is con-
fused about the status of their writing.
The relationships of theory to design have
been an ongoing subject of debate among
the historians and theorists of my genera-
tion - a debate within which I have not
been the one calling for an absolute separa-
tion between them. Indeed, I have repeat-
edly expressed my conviction that the
architect's writing is a kind of architectural
project, the specificity of which needs to be
respected as such. My favorite texts of this
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century have been written by architects,
not historians, and most of my research is
precisely about the relationships between
those texts and design practices. But it is
not so often that architects are as skilled as
writers as they are as designers or vice versa.
In that sense, architects like Koolhaas have
managed to appropriate the legacy of Loos
and Le Corbusier. The writings of some ar-
chitects command as much respect as their
designs. Lynn's review does not suggest that
he is a member of this group.
While Lynn works desperately hard to sug-
gest that some of us are tacitly operative crit-
ics for the kind of architecture he does not
like, in the process he forgets that when I
write about contemporary practice (as when
I look back to history) I am inclined to ex-
amine architects who engage with the new-
est technologies of communication of their
time. Ironically, this would suggest that his
interests are closer to mine than that of the
Light Construction crowd. Lynn uses crude
stereotypes to obscure the obvious.
More than anything else, he lacks a sense
of nuance. In the end, we learn very little
about either the Light Construction archi-
tecture or the Avant-garde colloquium.
Even the "younger" speakers (some of
whom are actually older than Hays and my-
self) that Lynn feels were unfairly over-
looked and "derided" (we are left to guess
by whom) have their arguments reduced to
a single name. To take his first example,
Detlef Mertins's detailed analysis of the dif-
ferences between Giedion and Kauffman's
reception in the United States is disrespect-
fully reduced to a "presentation of Giedion."
In fact, the only argument we learn some-
thing about is that of Koolhaas. I was not
speaking about Le Corbusier, as he seems
to imply, but about post-World War II
American architecture (or, if Lynn insists
on names, about Buckminster Fuller, Gre-
gory Ain, Edgar J. Kaufman, Jr., Marcel

Breuer, Elizabeth Mock, John Entenza,
Charles and Ray Eames - all, I suppose,
heroic figures of the avant-garde). Eisenman
was not speaking about Terragni, but about
Colin Rowe, and so on. It is as if Lynn was
not even there.
Indeed, he never left home. A protege of
Eisenman, he lightly pretends to criticize
him but dutifully submitted his review to
Eisenman for approval before sending it to
Assemblage. It reminds me of that new
generation of Italian and Spanish men
who are staying at home with their parents
into their twenties and even thirties. If you
never leave home, you only ever criticize
your parents while clinging to them and
eating their pasta.
Carrer de la ciutat represented a breaking
away from Arquitecturas bis (in the same
way that Assemblage represented a break-
ing away from Oppositions, which was still
alive when Assemblage was being formu-
lated). The first symptom of this break was
that we didn't bother to refer to it, let alone
criticize it. We did not have time for that,
so engrossed we were in our own project. It
was a new mode of operation, a shift in the
way of looking at architecture. But after a
few years it, too, had to be broken away
from. During the discussion that Lynn
claims to be reporting on, I responded to
Eisenman's suggestion that Assemblage
was an avant-garde journal by reminding
him of Le Corbusier's statement, when
closing L'Esprit Nouveau in 1925: "Five
years is a lot for a magazine. One ought
not to repeat oneself continuously. Others,
younger people will have younger ideas."
Assemblage, which will be ten years old
this fall, has long been a "middle-aged"
magazine - a point that I made both at
MoMA and in the Tulane conference on
architectural theory (see Assemblage 27).
Journals age much more quickly than their hand, we enjoy the new kind of tabloid
writers. While Assemblage may have been journal, from Newsline to Any or the new
129.78.56.136 on Mon, 05 Jul 2021 23:04:49 UTC
re:assemblage
an avant-garde journal in its early years, GSD News, even if we may be irritated by
sponsoring a new form of architectural the propagandist content. Assemblage is a
writing, by now it has assumed the dignity journal from another era. While never as
of an institution, which is not such a bad tightly controlled as its role models, Op-
thing. Middle age - as every woman in positions and October, Assemblage some-
how gained the reputation of being so.
her late thirties discovers - is a very good
time. But when Lynn complains about his But the content has always been a mixed
parents and grandparents in Assemblage, bag. Could it be that the contradiction
one wonders why he has yet to leave home. between the Octoberesque look and the
Why it is that he has not gathered together heterogeneous content has acted as a
some friends to launch a new journal (an block, despite its generosity? When al-
action that has become increasingly easy most anything goes, how can younger
in the age of desktop publishing and the voices really position themselves? A
by-now-old "new media")? Why have the mixed bag of architectural journals will
electronic architectural journals not taken benefit all of us.
off? Why do they tend to simply duplicate Beatriz Colomina
printed journals? Why is it that this coun-
try, which has done so much to sponsor
critical history and theory, is so bereft of
architectural journals?
Apparently, Lynn had obsessed over this re-
view for several months before giving it to
Assemblage. Too much it would seem.
While some of what happened called for de-
tailed intellectual and political analysis, in
Lynn's hands, it became the vehicle of mis-
placed resentment. I keep thinking that if he
had a different outlet, any kind, it may have
prevented him from getting all bottled up
inside. He may have been less incoherent.
Journals should be launched by the very
young. Twentysomething is much better
than thirtysomething. They require an
enormous amount of time, of energy, of
dedication. By the time one is working on
one's books, or buildings, it is too late to
start. Journals have an enormous pedagogi-
cal value. I learned more from Carrer de la
ciutat than in my six years of architectural
school. It is sad to see even the all-Ameri-
can tradition of school journals edited by
students dying out, the pace of the few that
remain reduced to a crawl. On the other
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To read Greg Lynn, you'd think there is a
conspiracy in the works: the phony-critical
"middle generation" history-theorists
Colomina and Hays insist on "propping up"
and "reinvigorating" the "tired," "dated,
modernist strategies" of the by-now-unim-
portant dead architects Mies van der Rohe
and Le Corbusier. By having focused on
architecture's historical "modern masters,"
Colomina and Hays provide artificial life
support for the modernist project and en-
courage the imitation of modernist forms.
Thus Lynn reveals Colomina and Hays as
poststructuralist "reactionary modernists"
whose work tacitly impedes the enactment
of some real, incipient avant-garde.
To read an attack on contemporary archi-
tecture that is conceptually grounded on a
Zeitgeist model seems strange. If the mod-
ern paradigm has been eclipsed, shouldn't
the recourse to the Zeitgeist for legitimiza-
tion have gone with it? (Given the same
question, however, it is difficult to argue
that the legitimizing Zeitgeist "should have
been eclipsed.") Do "new times" really
demand "new forms"? The insight that
neomodernism is as nostalgic as neoclassi-
cism reemerged around the time of the
Decon show. But this insight and Lynn's
points are based on two assumptions that
still should be considered more carefully:
first, that all modernist-looking architec-
tures (according to Lynn, everything in the
Light Construction show) are "neomodern";
and, second, that anything familiar-looking
is "conservative" or "reactionary."
The first of these assumptions is pretty in-
teresting to think through, although its full
consideration is outside of the scope of this
letter. But I think it should be possible to
imagine the difference between a "still-
modern" and a "modern-again," as well as
to suggest that not everything that looks
"modern" might really be modern. To
claim that Herzog and de Meuron's work
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assemblage 30
is a resurrection of a tired paradigm, for ex- tional categories "aesthetically and socially
ample (as Lynn does), implies that if these progressive" and "aesthetically and socially
architects were "in tune with the times," regressive" would, of course, remain. But
their work would be more. . . well, what? were we to accept the existence of both
more animated? folded? non-Euclidean? these (I believe related) new positions, we
That Mies's and Le Corbusier's deadness could no longer judge the social, political,
should prove their irrelevance smacks of and intellectual content of architectural
the same operative history Lynn rightly dis-work by its appearance alone: the unfamil-
misses as "modern" and retardataire. iar will not necessarily be the sign of
"progress." We may have to think a little
The second assumption is the one that con- harder.
cerns me more. Compared to some other
fields (like history), architectural discourse Lauren Kogod
is impoverished by its insistence on the
simple, two-term system of "progress" and
regress." We seem collectively to believe
that new forms necessarily accompany salu-
tary revolutions in thought and social value
and that familiar-looking things only and
always preserve the status quo, at best (or
pave the way for fascism or the return to
something like feudalism, at worst). There
must be something other than "forward"
and "backward" for the architectural critic,
and we cannot assume that "forward" al-
ways means "progress" and the familiar al-
ways represents a desire for social injustice.
Talk about avant-garde myths!
Were Lynn to tie his criticism into the work
of Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), he could
perhaps consider the inverse corollary to
"reactionary modernism." Recognizing that
many protofascist and Nazi intellectuals
were anything but the antimodernists that
many historians have traditionally assumed,
Herf has created a place on the conceptual
map for a kind of thought that is simulta-
neously aesthetically progressive and so-
cially reactionary. It must be possible, then,
to imagine a position that is aesthetically
conservative (or "conservational") and so-
cially progressive, despite our aesthetic Assemblage 30: 108-112 ? 1996 by the
training and preferences. The two tradi- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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