Informal Architectures (review)

Informal Architectures is a broad range of essays, interviews and artists' works that describe contemporary vocabularies and strategies not only for interpreting spatial culture, but also for responding to it. The book openly locates itself in a "post-9/11" context, and subsequently the texts examine space and place through the use of "social, philosophical, political and poetic" frameworks. The selection is substantial, with no less that 27 articles to contend with, making it a challenging task to make sense of its rubric. Rather refreshingly, Kiendl's book does not present architecture as in crisis, which is a common tactic in many architectural texts, but identifies its inertia and inability to escape modernity and uses the work of theorists to describe this and artists to offer methods for working with it. Beyond his articulate introduction, Kiendl requires us to piece together how art and architectural practices can be reconsidered as sensitive and yet optimistic in interfacing with contemporary place. He provides us with three primary categories with which to understand architecture's contemporary disposition; Space/Perception, Consumption/Ruin and Monument/ Ephemerality, within which he organizes the range of works.

Space/Perception, the first of the tri-lectic lenses (to borrow from Lefebvre), uses the spectator and user of architecture to reflect upon capitalism's impact upon the built environment. Addressing the political, economic and social circumstances that have transformed our experience of streets over the last 20 years, the authors depict how representational spaces have extended architecture's effects far beyond that of the façade. There is a delicate complexity in what is being described here, as the reader absorbs Keiller's analysis of the gentrification of the city through cafés and loft living and compares it to Miller's provocative proposals to obfuscate billboards from pedestrians' experience of the street.

Consumption/Ruin reminds us that contexts are larger than buildings themselves and that architecture's purpose is limited by the cultural and social constraints that surround it. This category describes how contingent architecture is, according to the time and place in which it is used and viewed; how in fact the bricks and mortar that initially provided shelter are superseded by the contextual tensions within which they are placed. Expressed through a persistent reference to destruction rather than construction, the texts puncture any last remaining right to permanence that architects should ascribe to buildings. Particularly effective is Weizman's essay describing the problems of re-inhabiting the de-colonized spaces of the Gaza Strip; equally effective is Antick's analysis of holocaust tourism as places such as Auschwitz are developed for different audiences.

The last category, Monument/Ephemerality, returns the reader to types of architectural art and design practice that negotiate the sensitive nature of environments that the previous sections have developed. The texts acknowledge how buildings and structures play a significant part in shaping the contracts between institutions and individuals, governments and societies. Architecture is both exposed as a political device and at the same time liberated through the examples of individuals who use it to express their own form of territory. The highly personal nature of many of these territorial activities is exemplified through McKeough's eating of a museum wall, Phillip's critical account of Francis Alÿs's piece "When Faith Moves Mountains" and Cowan's discussion of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established outside Parliament House in Canberra.

Kiendl's organization of the texts presents a range of circumstances through which architecture can be understood to be intrinsically linked without specific reference to the process of designing buildings. Easy enough, one might say, but what is refreshing here is the composition of theory and reflection alongside practice and intervention so as to provide the term architecture with as much contingency as possible and still retain integrity to creative processes that contribute to spatial culture. What Kiendl achieves through the book is a serious attempt to straddle art and architecture with a theoretical integrity that supports and embraces creative practice. The scale of...