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Introduction: Architectural Intellectuality at the Dawn of Postmodernism
- University of Minnesota Press
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INTRODUCTION Architectural Intellectuality at the Dawn of Postmodernism By the early 1960s, a young postwar generation of architects had seized the idea that architecture should participate in the liberation of human experience from the constraints of the social status quo. Raised during the ascendancy of postwar modernism in the West, they viewed its austere institutionalized aesthetics as the emblem of an oppressive and closed social order. They thought individual experience had been impoverished by the process of industrialization and became disillusioned with the modernist faith in technology as the driver of emancipation. In a radical break from modernist ideology, some members of that generation sought to reground the future of modern architecture in the premodern past. To accomplish this change of direction, they had to replace the piloting concepts of modernism, from the abstract ideas of space and form, toward new notions of history and theory. Out went the conviction that technology drove history, and in came the sense that architectural history was driven by the search for authentic, original human experiences. They replaced the belief that architecture would become more sophisticated as technology moved toward the future teleologically, with the notion that architecture would become more advanced as human experience returned to its origins ontologically. They conceived contemporary experience in terms of historical continuity rather than rupture. The protagonists of this intellectual shift were not a self-identified group armed with an emblematic manifesto, but rather a series of independent architects whose collective achievements are understandable only retroactively as constituting a new intellectual formation—architectural phenomenology— which recast history as the experiential content of modern architecture. This collective discourse achieved the greatest coherence in the United States, in the academic circles that formed around the figures of Jean Labatut (1899–1986), Charles Moore (1925–1993), Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000), and Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930), whose teachings and writings made their impact on architectural culture slowly and deliberately, over decades rather than years. As some of the most influential pedagogues and international best-selling xi authors, they led the transformation of Western architectural culture during the so-called postmodern period, changing how architects learned and understood the relationship of modern architecture to its history. Their ability to produce such a discourse helped legitimize the recuperation of historical architecture as an inspiration for modern design and underpinned the emergence of the postmodern style. But more importantly, their ingenious construction of new experiential protocols for researching and writing architectural history had an intellectual impact that lasted long after the postmodern style went out of fashion. They made the study of architectural history the hallmark of the intellectual architect or, as we say today, the architect theorist. Yet, however staunchly committed to the intellectualization of architecture, they were also firm believers in the primacy of lived experience over detached mental analyses as a means to understand the history of architecture. They were thus caught in the paradoxical position of having to intellectualize their resistance to the emergence of theory as something separate from practice. Their ambivalence sowed the seeds of anti-intellectualism into contemporary architectural theory. Postmodernism in architecture was both a stylistic movement and an intellectual sea change that germinated in the postwar period, took root in the 1970s, and flourished in the 1980s. While postmodernism is easy to identify stylistically, its intellectual contours are not as straightforward to discern. This book aims to clarify the nature of architectural phenomenology as one of the major unexamined intellectual sources of postmodern architectural thought. The name obscures as much as reveals its derivations, making them seem primarily philosophical, when in fact they were also aesthetic and included practices like camouflage, graphic design, and photography. It is difficult for us today to look at a camouflage pattern, a supergraphic paint scheme, or a carefully framed picture of a construction joint as anything more than various aesthetizations of theory, that is, as ex post facto representations of intellectual work. Yet before the rise of what we now call architectural theory, these practices were included in what was considered legitimate intellectual work in architecture, not something secondary to mental acts but as their primary source and governing standard. Architectural phenomenology refers to this ambiguous intellectual realm and to the process whereby architects became aware of its ambiguity, testing, contesting, celebrating, and exploiting it for the purpose of defending the belief that architectural practice embodied a unique mode of intellectuality that could not be separated from aesthetic experience. xii INTRODUCTION [44.220.245.254] Project MUSE (2024...