Customer Reviews

Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America

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Autonomy and Ideology is a self-congratulatory collection of the presentations made at a conference held by the Dept. of Architecture at Columbia University in 1996. The event pivoted around the excuse of analyzing the architectural avant-garde in the USA from 1923 to 1949.

Trite, predictable, and self-fulfilling the volume offers plenty of big names that unfortunately do little to question the premise of the event, let alone what avant-garde is, to barely scratch the surface with minimally constructive narratives about that period in architectural history and the importance and challenges of articulating an avant-garde. Few hint at a critique of the proposal, and offer a bit of interesting analysis. The contribution by Beatriz Colomina being maybe the most pointed.

Ultimately, the book reads more as an anthropological document of architectural internal discourses that serves as therapy to part of the discipline, rather than any interesting contribution to social analysis of what is the use, cultural role and perception of practices labeled as "avant-garde" as they relate to the built environment.