In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment ed. by Henri Lefebvre, Łukasz Stanek
  • Olga Touloumi (bio)
Henri Lefebvre, Łukasz Stanek, editor; Robert Bononno, translator
Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
lxi + 248 pages, 22 black-and-white illustrations (black-and-white and color in the Kindle edition).
ISBN: 978-081-667719-1, $84.00 HB
ISBN: 978-081-667720-7, $29.95 PB
Kindle, $15.49

One of the most prolific and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre transformed how we understand the built environment, discussing space as a social product. In his writings, he pioneered a widely influential Marxist perspective that called for a reconsideration of everyday life and the ordinary and a rejection of more conceptual and abstract approaches. The English translation of his seminal The Production of Space in 1991, in particular, provoked new discussions about the built environment throughout the humanities and especially in the social sciences. Yet while also widely employed by architectural and urban historians, these writings seemed to have surprisingly little to say specifically about buildings, framing architecture instead as inherently compliant to the forces of capitalism and the structural principles of division of labor, class hierarchy, and accumulation of wealth. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment complicates these assumptions.

The core of the book is an unpublished eponymous essay written in 1973 and recently rediscovered by Łukasz Stanek, an architectural historian who has researched and written extensively on Lefebvre’s theories and their impact on the post–World War II built environment.1 Edited by Stanek and translated [End Page 112] by Robert Bononno, who also did Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (2003), the revived text illuminates a more expansive understanding of architecture as a spatial practice of the everyday, foregrounding individualized and vernacular approaches while highlighting the role of minor actors in the production of space.2 Framing the essay is a forward by Stanek outlining the circumstances of his discovery entitled “A Manuscript Found in Saragossa” and an introduction in which Stanek explores, among other things, the historical conditions surrounding the production of the manuscript, bringing it in dialogue with its postwar French context of grand ensembles (modernist housing estates) and other architectural experiments, and the Programme commun du gouvernement (Common program of government) and the effort to include public opinion in urban planning—the subject of Kenny Cupers’s recent The Social Project (2014).3

Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment began as a collaboration between Lefebvre and Mario Gaviria, a renowned sociologist who, like Lefebvre, dedicated his career to developing a Marxist theory of space. While researching touristic development in Spain, Gaviria commissioned Lefebvre to write an essay on “the architecture of pleasure.” The two saw a revolutionary potential in leisure that the French left and in particular the Communist party dismissed as irrelevant to the Marxist social project. For Gaviria and Lefebvre, however, the concept of leisure as time spent outside the framework of capitalist production and consumption could radically unsettle class hierarchies and divisions of labor. But instead of a chapter on the particulars of the built environment of tourism, Lefebvre delivered a lengthy theoretical exposé on jouissance, or enjoyment—a concept that Bononno meticulously examines in a helpful translator’s note as distinct and separate from its common psychoanalytic framings. Lefebvre separated the milieu of tourism from the idea of leisure while opening up the field of architecture to discussions of bodily experience, participation, and individual spatial interventions. Not knowing what to make of the text, Gaviria buried it within his personal archives, where Stanek unearthed it in 2008.

Lefebvre’s critique starts where Gaviria’s expectations ended. Unlike Gaviria, Lefebvre draws a hard line between mass tourism and spaces of leisure. For Lefebvre mass tourism and the architecture produced to serve it constitute products of capitalism. Building programs typically associated with leisure, such as nightclubs, discotheques, and casinos, obey and reinforce the principles of capital accumulation. He distinguishes the buildings, however, from spaces of leisure, which materialize only outside the framework of capitalism, when the act of enjoyment does not feed back into the loop of surplus value production. In short, Lefebvre asks his reader to “not confuse the...

pdf

Share