Index Architecture (review)

If you are wondering what Index Architecture indexes, the answer is Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAP)—if not the most important U.S. center for architectural theory and advanced design practice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, then among an elite few. As one would expect from a university department that was a ghetto of historic preservation and postmodernism before Bernard Tschumi transformed it into a theoretical powerhouse facing digital visualization, new materials, and the integrating of digital with analog production, an entrée into the world of Columbia Speak is useful, interesting and potentially enlightening.

If at first the book seems a dictionary of contemporary words used in architectural chant—it is not. As Tschumi states in his introduction: "Recurring words or phrases became the key terms around which the writings, interviews, and images selected by the critics . . . were organized. We did not aim for ideological coherence." As a guide to design thought via these selected words, Index Architecture emerges as a filtered and condensed view of the last 15 years of architectural perspective as it has infected Columbia in studio brief quotations, excerpts from other publications, and fragments of interviews conducted by Matthew Berman with the participating GSAP faculty: Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture), Karen Bausman, Kathryn Dean, Evan Douglis, Kenneth Frampton, Leslie Gill, Hanrahan and Meyers, Laurie Hawkinson, Steven Holl, Jeffrey Kipnis, Kolatan/MacDonald, Greg Lynn, Reinhold Martin, Mary McLeod, Reiser and Umemoto, Bernard Tschumi and Mark Wigley. Edited by Tschumi and Berman, the book illustrates the quoted passages with both student projects and illustrations from the faculty's work.

Index Architecture is an idiosyncratic collection that sometimes connects and sometimes sounds banal (theory wonk) notes, but mostly it connects. Since I teach in a program called Genetic Architecture, I immediately went for "genetic" and found nothing; next I looked up "biology" and found an intriguing entry by Karen Bausman that spoke as much about photography. What became apparent was that this entry is more a view into a particular theoretic sensibility that Bausman brought to Columbia than a working literary or scientific definition of the word. So why is such a definition interesting and useful? Because, transferred from the context of a studio brief to an Index Architecture entry, Bausman's thoughts in relation to biology, photography and architecture offer a trace, an idea seed, that may be extrapolated and redeployed by the reader for contemplation or inspiration. Bausman's "biology" is a valuable view into a moment of didactic expression that only a handful of students were party to before this publication. And the aggregate of all such entries yields a tool for insight into underpinnings of contemporary architecture as well as Tschumi's tenure as reflected in this particular set of professor's word/thought/graphic editorial choices.

After "biology," I surfed the book for other entries written by Bausman to see if I could extrapolate or understand the connectors she has built as an intellectual platform for her classes, and I found that two other entries—"organic" and "time"—served to suggest a network of references, sending up a flag that I should watch out for other Bausman works beyond the book. From these first citations I shaped my further browsing of Index Architecture. I began following the entries of Hawkinson, Lynn, Douglis and Wigley for an insight into what could be discerned about the orbits of their thoughts in relation to architecture, production, teaching and theory within the context of their Columbia studios. I was particularly interested in Lynn's dealing with "blob," since it obviously has potentially close links with growth systems (both digital and analog), which the book then cross-referenced with "aesthetics/ appearance; complexity" in a chain that began directing my reading in the manner of a hypertext.

While I would like to have many other words included in Index Architecture—"algorithm," "biomimetics," and "monad," to name only three—that is a reading into the book of my...