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Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Writing Architecture)

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Michael Hays of Harvard GSD has produced an interesting and thought-provoking take on the ways in which the architects Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hedjuk, and Bernard Tschumi sought to "negotiate the real"in their construction of concepts and "subject positions" (during the years roughly 1966-1983). The author is admirably clear in stating up front that this has little or nothing to do with the "making of things" (architectural objects). It is an historical compte rendu of the imputed philosophical aspirations of this (so-called late avant-garde) generation via their "inquiry into what is, what might be, and how the latter can happen."

The discussion is launched by way of the "received" views of the late critic and Renaissance scholar Manfredo Tafuri and the somewhat more recently deceased Mannerist historian and critic Colin Rowe, whose rather different yet coincident views are labeled "not so much incorrect, as... not correct enough" with regard to the impasse of post-modernist architectural ambitions. Instead, Hays would like to bracket Tafurian black pessimism and Rovian inquisitive skepticism with the question: "Where does architecture come from, and what authorizes its existence as architecture--- beyond the [largely Humanist-based] constitutions already in place?", a demand he specifies to have been the "query of the late avant-garde."

The author's "not correct enough" maxim hinges on full philosophical immersion in the "matrix of [Lacanian] desire", and the reader unfamiliar with Lacan's elaborate and not infrequently shifting terminology will make scant headway, especially in the opening chapter labeled "Desire", at the end of which Hays makes the suggestion that, after all, this first chapter should perhaps have been read last. This latecomer proviso is concomitant with the authorial hope that each of the four-architect chapters "can be read independently". Since each of these four is said, as pointed out above, to have striven to "negotiate the real", it may be well to indicate Hays's reminder at the end of the "Desire" chapter that: "Lacan defines the Real as 'that which resists symbolization absolutely.'"

The Lacanian framework progresses notably more smoothly as the book proceeds toward the fourth chapter Hays devotes to his easily recognizable hero, John Hedjuk. The discussion of Aldo Rossi is a tad shoehorned into the Tafurian mold, which already during the lifetimes of both critic and architect Rossi had begun to chafe at. Though Hays is from a part of the world notable for its sensibility to registers of character, speech, and language, yet like the (Roman-born) Tafuri before him, he fails to appreciate fully the exquisitely Milanese nature of the Tendenza and of Rossi's own (almost Stendhalian) personal stance. Rossi in his own right was a keen analogist, able to absorb and interpret vernacular styles, and traditions in Catalonia, Ticino, and finally America.

Here the first part of the Rossi chapter is occupied in drawing parallels with semiotics and French structuralism, on the one hand, and architecture on the other. However, these were largely collateral concerns for Rossi and, above all, the fact that the post-1968 crisis in the Milan Polytechnic is not dealt with renders Rossi as a kind of free-floating agent, which indeed, on account of that crisis, he later became to an extent. Moreover, Peter Eisenman's preface and introduction to the American edition of *Architecture of the City* (that appeared at the end of the period under discussion) make no bones about the "normalization" of this text and the well-intentioned attempt to reign in Rossi under the divers IAUS umbrella.

It is ironic, therefore, that the Eisneman chapter of Hays's book exudes the least apparent enthusiasm and provides the heaviest going. Movement here is, as Hays characterizes it, from "the structuralization of the object to the textualization of the site, by way of Tafuri (by implication and via Eisneman's personal contact with the Italian critic), Jacques Derrida (later a friend and associate), Walter Benjamin, and also Freud. Hays's narrative is dutiful, if exemplary, but ends in a paragraph that gives the game away, when, as Hays states, "Eisenman's glass beads of perfect repetition are thrown against the hard floor of building practice."

The next chapter entitled "Encounter" is the longest and possibly Hays's best written, in a work that is well written throughout, and for someone like me, who never knew the much loved John Hedjuk, is reason enough for the book. Although Hedjuk was surely not more literary or anymore of an intellectual than the early Rossi, the Hedjuk canon on its own works better without any prompting for a US audience, who were regaled with lectures at the Cooper Union in New York. The relationship to Le Corbusier, architectural modernism's greatest legacy to postmodernism, as defined by Hays, is now (and must always have been) clear. Finally, the case for Lacanian metaphor is obvious and unforced, as is the author's reference to Bahktin.

Hays is also very good on Tschumi, in whose work the Real makes itself known "not in the substance but rather in the failures and duplicities of the architectural signifier." There is talk of Hegel and again of Adorno, and also of Archizoom and Superstudio "with whom Tschumi clearly sympathizes." And, additionally, Bernard Tsuchumi has been able to take an even view of Le Corbusier and Bataille, not least at the "rotten point", where as Tschumi has it: "glass meets mould" or in the "gaps, holes, and cracks, that are the marks of architectural desire. (Hays)" It has been Tschumi's point of strength to realize architecture as an event and to mark "the disjunction between the particular event of architecture and the architectural unconscious into which the actual event is constantly fading--- the lost Other that architecture desires."

Denise Scott-Brown, too, has had a cameo role in all these goings on, rightfully and I think helpfully so, yet the book has been conceived by MIT Press as without an index (though with copious end notes) so it's difficult to locate her and others, except symphonically within the text). Hays ends the story with Rem Koolhaas, his co-option of the Downtown Athletic Club, and finally his essay entitled "Junkspace" of now nearly a decade ago. You will have to be a paid-up member of the Lacan Club to "get" all the author's references, to participate to the maximum in his lyricism (particularly the Hedjukian), and to draw with Michael Hays full circle to the conclusions of his protagonists. But you can still be an honorary member and acquire most of the benefits and enjoyment. There are seven color plates and a number of in-text figures.

David B. Stewart
Tokyo Tech