Lefebvre for Architects by Nathaniel Coleman (review)

Henri Lefebvre was a philosopher and sociologist with roots in the Pyrenees and an intellectual life in Paris that spanned almost exactly 90 percent of the twentieth century—he was born in 1901 and died in 1991. His work was a major factor in defining the study of everyday life, and his engagements with theory, culture, space, and place reached from Surrealism and Dada to a turbulent (and anti-Stalinist) relationship with the Communist Party, the equally turbulent Situationist International, and the visionary architects of COBRA. His influential book The Right to the City (Le Droit à la Ville) is often cited as a major influence in the May 1968 student uprising. Lefebvre’s significance for architecture, landscape architecture, and planning arises from his explicit engagement with and observation of the spaces of contemporary life, famously in cities and buildings and importantly in rural and peri-urban landscapes.¹

In Nathaniel Coleman’s introduction to Lefebvre for Architects, he expresses a commitment to providing a concise account of Henri Lefebvre’s writing—in the context of architecture—that does not underplay the centrality of utopian and romantic strains to his work or of Marx’s centrality to his thinking. Architecture, while embracing Lefebvre’s work since its relatively recent entry into the Anglosphere, in particular his monumental The Production of Space, translated into English the year he died, has tended to suppress this content. Coleman references the Thatcherite mantra of TINA—“There Is No Alternative”—as the neoliberal kernel ingested by architecture that is much to blame for this resistance, but also he writes, “Lefebvre’s work holds out for renewed practices even at a time of neoliberal consensus” (2).

Architecture, Coleman writes, “has great difficulty thinking its own thoughts” (15), or perhaps it has come to this impasse after some decades now of servitude to neoliberal practices, and he recruits Lefebvre’s work because his keen view from outside the discipline helps provide a contextual structure for architectural thought. If there is no alternative, there is little reason to worry about context: “My aim in this book is to make Lefebvre speak to architects by showing how he speaks like an architect, or at least like a reconstituted thinker of architecture able to think his own thoughts; able to think beyond the crisis of architecture foisted upon it by capitalism, which the general lack of disciplinary self-confidence—which is a symptom—exacerbates” (16).

Coleman’s method employs hermeneutics, phenomenology, and pragmatism and “links theory to practice, space to time and form to content, in identifying how the imagination and production of concrete alternatives are, as Lefebvre believed, hiding out in the plain sight of the everyday” (4). This method clearly parallels the palimpsestic method of Lefebvre himself while also rather highlighting, counter to his statement above, intellectual methods that are not necessarily germane to contemporary architectural thought. Lefebvre actually speaks to architects by showing how they ought to speak. This is far from problematic for Coleman’s interpretation, however, as the positive futurity contained in the ought here simply underscores Lefebvre’s utopian message.

Coleman also emphasizes the fundamental interconnection of theory and spatial practice that is explicit in Lefebvre’s work: “A further aim of this book is to translate Lefebvre’s ideas into potentialities for action (which I believe he would have approved of). The dual challenge of such a project is to render intelligible Lefebvre’s thought for architects, while also demonstrating how it might be enacted, that is, to show how Lefebvre’s theories can inform practices” (4). The enactment of Lefebvre’s thought requires a conception of the work of architecture that is at once quite foreign to contemporary practice and quite crucial to it: that the city and the countryside together make up a work—an oeuvre—that is collective, cumulative, and often beautiful. This militates against the conceit, dear to the heart of contemporary architecture, that buildings (or landscapes) might primarily operate as sculpture, which has the effect of devaluing the...