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1. A Polygraph of Architectural Phenomenology:
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CHAPTER ONE A Polygraph of Architectural Phenomenology The nature of architectural phenomenology makes it challenging to historicize . That it presented itself as a new way of doing architectural history requires that one contend with its historiographical conventions without succumbing to them. Yet after architectural phenomenology, it is not possible to simply approach it through the traditional historiographical frameworks it undermined and reconfigured. Its very nature and legacy defy that operation. It disappears under the lenses of architectural histories based on personal biography, selfidentified groups, individual schools, institutions, geopolitical borders, or architectural styles. To uncover how architectural phenomenology gained coherence requires a new critical historiography capable of moving between aesthetic interpretations and intellectual and social history. What normally passes as the intellectual history of architecture is seldom more than snapshots that capture an architect’s definition of architecture at a particular point in time, which are then presented as “theories” of architecture and collected in edited volumes. Thus, intellectual history appears as an autonomous and transcendent system with a magical capacity to transform itself. Each new “theory” appears to have descended from another pure world of ideas (e.g., the world of philosophy) and caused an epistemological break with how architecture was conceived in the past. But so-called epistemological shifts are the product of changes in the relationships between individual agents, each of whom is motivated by the expectation of being rewarded for effecting change. Individual agency both forms and is formed by the discipline in which it operates. By exposing the different motivations and capacities that led each protagonist to weave together the thematic strands of experience, history, and theory that made up architectural phenomenology, the chapters that follow draw forth the connected web of social, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions that gave coherence to this discourse, without losing sight of the particular contributions of each person. 1 My historiographic method, which I describe as polygraphic, differs fundamentally from monographic historiography. The latter has dealt with the question of contemporary architecture in one of two ways: by focusing on individuals or on self-identified groups. When writing the history of architecture, we must be careful not to unwittingly fall into the monographic trap toward which we are gently predisposed by the records, already prepared and packaged monographically for us, by symposium organizers and self-selected groups of architects. That some architects, at one point in time, thought it advantageous to portray themselves as a group, does not necessarily mean that we must take them at their word, or that the monograph is the best way of capturing a chapter in the history of architectural ideas. Selection and self-selection are related social phenomena, but they are not the same thing, and it is important not to unwittingly conflate the two. The conflation I am arguing against is the kind perpetrated by historians who choose to limit their writing to self-selected groups of architects (e.g., CIAM, GATEPAC, Team X, Archigram). In such cases, the historiographical operation of selection follows the contours of the architects’ self-selection. There are some benefits to a historiography that shadows self-selection. One advantage for the historian is the appearance that an objective, self-evident selection has been made. When applied to intellectual history, the historian describes an idea that was explicitly embraced by a group of architects, which shows that idea to have common currency. In the latter half of the twentieth century, countless architectural groups formed to uphold specific ideas. But a library full of books dedicated to each of these groups in isolation would not begin to approximate the transformation of architectural intellectuality that took place during that period. The historiographical conflation of selection and self-selection clearly has its benefits, but it also has its downsides, especially in regard to intellectual history. A major drawback is that it must remain silent before ideas shared among nonaffiliated individuals and cannot explain what gives intellectual coherence to the larger field of architecture. The monographic selection of selfselected groups skews the portrayal of the intellectual field in favor of the exceptional and the intentional. It also wrongly identifies the particular views of small groups with the entire field. Ideas that might have been commonly shared and debated among architects, yet for one reason or another were not explicitly espoused or renounced by a self-selected group, get relegated to a second plane. Thus, what is central to the field as a whole is rendered as peripheral and is loosely portrayed as context. 2...