EPILOGUE

We are in the presence of anachronism, nostalgia, and, probably, frivolity.Colin Rowe (1968)

1968

Architectural theory is conventionally said to be a phenomenon born out of a tradition and therefore one thatgenerally operates by evolution rather than by revolution. Inquiet times this is generally the case. Very little, if anything,is ever new to architectural theory, and often generations ofarchitects grapple with the very same issues, albeit within achanging historical context. But theory, too, is almost always visibly shaken by momentous intellectual, political,and economic events. The intellectual foment surrounding the Enlightenment defined one such moment withinthe course of Western history. World War I made its markon theory, and the Great Depression ushered in a new eraof thought. The year 1968 seems to define another suchmoment.

Nineteen sixty-eight was above all a year of politicalconvulsion and violence.1 In Europe tlie year openedand closed with the uplifting and disheartening events inCzechoslovakia. In early January, Antonin Novotny, the firstsecretary of the Communist Party, was ousted from his position by the Slovak Alexander Dubcek (1927-93), whopromised "socialism with a human face." With the furtherremoval of Novotny loyalists from tlie cabinet in March, the"Prague Spring" became a cause of worldwide celebration.The country's censorship laws were quickly revoked, andpeople in the streets reveled in their newfound freedom ofexpression. Their enthusiasm was echoed in neighboringPoland, where students took to the street to oppose thatcountry's communist rulers and censorship laws.

From Moscow, however, the Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnevwatched the developments with growing concern - despite

Dubcek's commitment to socialism and friendship with theUSSR. The response came in August when Brezhnev ordered500,000 Warsaw Pact troops to cross the Chechoslovakianborder and occupy the city of Prague. The resurrected secret police rounded up and beat demonstrators. Dubcek wasflown to Moscow in chains and undoubtedly would havebeen killed had not the Chechoslovakian people bravely resisted the Soviet attempt to impose an interim government.Finally, under extreme duress, Dubcek was forced to signthe draconian Moscow Protocol and was brought back toPrague, where, before a national television audience, hetearfully renounced his crimes and announced the revocation of his earlier measures. The following spring he wasofficially replaced by Gustav Husak, and tlie Iron Curtainwas back in place.

The streets of Western Europe were also flooded withdemonstrators in the spring and summer of 1968, but forvery different reasons. In Germany demands for universityreforms and the sudden popularity of such drugs as lsd andhashish were among the factors contributing to the demon-strations taking place at most German universities and politically orchestrated by the Socialist Students League (sds).The shooting in April of one student activist, Rudi Dutschke,led to a sharp escalation in the number of demonstrationsand inspired demonstrators to carry placards with picturesof Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, tlie Spartacistrevolutionaries who were killed in 1919. Somewhat ironically, the center of the student insurrection in Germany wasthe Free University in Berlin, which had been founded in1948 because Berlin's famed Humboldt University was located in what became the Soviet-controlled sector of tliecity.

404

EPILOGUE

England was also politically active in the spring and summer of 1968, the two principal issues being its new immigration (racial) problems and the Vietnam War, to whichthere was growing opposition. Far more significant in sizeand intensity, however, was the unrest in France and Italy.The so-called May Movement in Paris actually began at theNanterre campus of the University of Paris in March 1968,when students, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, took over the administration building. The school was subsequently closedat the start of April, was reopened after the Easter recess, butwas closed again on 2 May because of renewed demonstrations. The decision to close the school a second time intensified the problem by bringing the insurgents into the city.The arrest of a few students in a courtyard of the Sorbonneon 3 May ignited the explosion. Massive demonstrations,guerilla tactics, strikes, and simple rioting engulfed Parisfor the rest of the month. Barricades were erected in tlieLatin Quarter, and eventually the Sorbonne and Ecole desBeaux-Arts were occupied. Sympathetic "intellectuals" wereregularly featured on nightly newscasts.

The reasons for the French upheaval were complex. Oneof its historians, Alain Touraine, has insisted that it heralded a new form of class struggle against technocracy, consumerism, and the commercialization of human and sexualrelations.2 Another reason was that the university systemhad scarcely kept abreast of the growing numbers or changing interests of the postwar generation and needed to bereformed. And then there were the contingents of Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, and anarchists who, underthe banner of anticolonialism and concern over the war,were seeking the overthrow of the sociopolitical "system" inits entirety.

Architectural students occupying the Ecole des Beaux-Arts shared many of these diverging interests. The "Motionof 15 May," issued a day after students occupied the building,called for various school reforms, such as open admissionsand the end of examinations and competitions, but also paidlip service to the abstraction of the "workers' struggle" andthe need to combat "the conditions of architectural production, which in fact subordinate it to the interests of publicor private developers."3

The simultaneous demonstrations in Italy - demonstrations that replicated those that had been taking place regularly since 1964 - were equal in size and more overtlypolitical. Once again the causes were the difficult economic conditions in Italy and the outmoded academicsystem, which were jointly responsible for the fact thatfewer than half of the architecture school graduates found

work within the field. Teaching reforms along far moreradical lines were demanded, however. For instance, "RedGuard" students at the University of Turin insisted upontlie election of professors and the grading of all examinations by student committees.4 The most persistent disruptions took place in the universities located in the majorcites: Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, Pisa, andTurin. By the end of March, twenty-six universities wereunder siege, and the disruptions, combined regularly withworkers' strikes and revolutionary calls to action, persistedthrough the year and over the next several years, in fact,bringing the Italian government to a virtual standstill. Amilitant Marxism - despite the events occurring inCzechoslovakia - became the panacea of Italian intellectuals and students.

This trend is reflected in architectural theory nowherebetter than in the ideas of Manfredo Tafuri (1935-94), whoarrived in Venice in the spring of 1968 as the newly appointed professor at the Institute of Architectural History.5The city was already in the midst of political and socialturmoil. The Piazza San Marco and other areas of the citywere scenes of repeated occupation by students and clasheswith police. Tafuri's arrival was also nearly simultaneouswith the publication of the first of his critical studies, Teoriee storia dell'architettura (Theories and history of architecture), which had been written in 1966-7.6 Eager to jointhe revolutionary cause, he drew close to the two editorsof Contropiano, Alberto Asor Rosa and Massimo Cacciari.Contropiano was a newly formed militant journal whose focus (until its dissolution in 1971) was "the analysis of thequestions to do with class struggle" and with "the analysisof the ideal and cultural superstructures of mass capitalistic society." Tafuri's first article for this journal, "Per unacritica dell'ideologia architettonica" (Toward a critique ofarchitectural ideology), was written in the final months of1968 and significantly advanced his thought.8 In addition,at the institute Tafuri quickly assembled a cadre of radicalhistorians and theoreticians into what became a collectiveworking program of Marxist analyses. Among them wereMario Manieri Elia, Francesco Dal Co, Giorgio Ciucci, andMarco De Milchelis.

What took place in 1968 in Venice also has to be seenagainst the backdrop of the debates of the 1950s and early1960s. Italian modernism had emerged from World War IIwith something of a bad conscience because of its wartimeassociation with Fascism. The leading Italian historiansof tlie immediate postwar years, such as Bruno Zevi andLeonardo Benevolo, in their own ways retreated from the

405

MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

problem: in Zevi's case through his support for an "organic" modernism founded on American and Scandinavianmodels, in Benevolo's case through advocating a modernismbound to social activism. The effort of Ernesto Rogers inthe late 1950s to inject history and memory into modernarchitecture too can be viewed as an attempt to decontaminate modernism from its recent past - essentially by mediating modernism with the broader historical context of Italy.Tafuri in tlie late 1960s was coming to reject these attemptsas well as their underlying humanist bases. His historicalapproach in the years around 1968 has been variously defined as one of total disenchantment, iconoclasm, destruc-turing, and Nietzschean-inspired nihilism, but his analysesat heart were always rigorous in their Marxist premises andwere offered in service to revolutionary praxis. If one ofhis main historical interests was the European avant-gardeof the 1920s and 1930s - dada, surrealism, the Bauhaus,constructivism - his ideological and critical framework waslikewise the leftist sociological framework of this period,as found in the works of Georg Simmel, Max Weber, KarlMannheim, Georg Lukacs, and Walter Benjamin. The ideasof these thinkers were updated by the negative dialectics of Theodore Adorno and the structuralism of RolandBarthes. Architecture as building now virtually recedes fromsight; critical theory in itself becomes its own operativeyardstick.

Teorie e storia dell'architettura outlines a new path, although it is by no means a fully formed work. Overtly it addresses itself to the perceived "crisis" of contemporary history and theory, but not in the manner of earlier historians,who were generally keen to point the way out of the dilemmas. The book purports to be "a courageous and honestscrutiny of the very foundations of the Modern Movement;in fact, a thorough investigation of whether it is still legitimate to speak of a Modern Movement as a monolithiccorpus of ideas, poetics and linguistic traditions."9 Whatthe book delivers is an abstruse "labyrinthine" discussionin which boundless names and references pop up, only tofall back without commentary or deliberation. On the onehand, a Foucauldian sense of conspiracy surfaces, allowing fantastic but dubious conceptual speculations imbuedwith urgent psychoanalytical drama.10 On the other hand,structuralism, semiology, and typology are drafted into theservice of critical theory. Further, the role that history playsas an "instrument" of architectural thinking is avowed tobe ambiguous. For Tafuri, the task of tlie historian is nolonger that of the delineator of genealogies directed towardpresent (design) consumption; his now more hostile purpose

is to break the hidden code between architectural metalanguage and ideology, to reveal the anxiety that lies beneaththe surface.

If the book lacks coherence, it is almost moot becausecrucial change overtakes Tafuri's outlook took in tlie secondhalf of 1968. His revised position first appears in his essay"Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology." Its overtly political argument, drawing heavily on the nihilism of Cacciariis far more pessimistic in its tone, though without sacrificing any of its conspiratorial air. For instance, he notes that"there exists, between the avant-gardes of capital and tlieintellectual avant-gardes, a kind of tacit understanding, sotacit indeed that any attempt to bring it into the light elicits achorus of indignant protest."11 Tafuri sees all architecturaldevelopment since the Enlightenment as walking in lock-step with capitalism and thus in an insoluble state of crisis.In this period, the utopianisms of Laugier and Piranesi ofthe 1830s and the 1920s follow a rather precise dialectical process of accommodation and feigned redemption, asK. Michael Hays reports, "a unitary development in whichthe avant-gardes' visions of Utopia come to be recognizedas an idealization of capitalism, a transfiguration of the lat-ter's rationality into the rationality of autonomous form -architecture's 'plan,' its ideology."12 There is no way, Tafuriargues, to rid arcliitecture of this bourgeois contamination,even by participating in "the economic and social conflictsexploding with ever greater frequency" and assisting capitalism in its inevitable fall:

This has forced a return to activism - to strategies of stimulus,critique, and struggle - on the part of the intellectual opposition, and even of class problems and conflicts. The harshnessof the struggle over urban-planning laws (in Italy as well asthe US), over the reorganization of the building industry, overurban renewal, may have given many the illusion that the fightfor planning could actually constitute a moment in the classstruggle.13

Architecture, because of its false ideology, has therefore lostits capacity to offer any vision for a postcapitalist world. Ithas reached the beginning of its natural end. As Tafuri latersummarizes the matter in his Progetto e Utopia (1973, translated into English as Architecture and Utopia): "There is nomore 'salvation' to be found within it; neither by wanderingrestlessly through 'labyrinths' of images so polyvalent thatthey remain mute, nor by shutting oneself up in the sullensilence of geometries content with their own perfection.

Tafuri's apocalyptic vision has been rightly criticizedon several levels - from its nihilistic abstractions and

406

EPILOGUE

psychoanalytical pretensions to its internal logicallimitations.15 As a politicization of architecture theory, itof course rises and falls on its own political premises. Buttlie critique also in a very shrewd way explodes many of thenaive beliefs of historians up to this time. It highlights notonly attempts to subjugate the past and future with prescribed narratives in service to the present but also the veryimpossibility of a one-to-one relationship between form andmeaning - an idea that "deconstruction" would soon entertain in full. It also succinctly captures the "crisis" of theoryin 1968: this time a genuine architectural crisis of colossalmagnitude.

The concomitant convulsions of theory in the UnitedStates in 1968 emanate from very different causes and emotional grounds. For one thing, the problems troubling American society were long simmering and if anything far moresevere than those abroad, driven as they were by an unpopular war, vestiges of racism, and a nearly spontaneousbreakdown of social values. For another thing, the culturaldiversity and pragmatic eclecticism of American intellectualthought tended to reject overly rigid philosophical systems(such as Marxism) or any single explanation for the vastcultural and social breakdown.

In any case, in the 1960s events, rather than ideology, werecausing the unrest. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in1963 created the first" crack in the Cold War facade of social optimism. Lyndon B. Johnson further ruptured it withhis disastrous decision late in 1964 to escalate the Vietnamconflict into a war. He not only sent hundreds of thousandsof American ground troops into battle but initiated a relentless and ineffective bombing campaign against the communist North that ensured a widening of the hostilities. As theAmerican ground forces could only be supplied by a much-expanded military draft, the draft itself provided a rallyingpoint for social opposition among the young - oppositionthat grew proportionally with tlie increasing number of battlefield casualties. The proliferation of peace marches andantidraft demonstrations in 1966 and 1967, foremost themarch on the Pentagon itself in October 1967, set the stagefor the cataclysms of 1968.

The other factor driving American social unrest - the CivilRights movement - began in earnest in tlie spring of 1963with the marches of Martin Luther King in Alabama, wherehe was opposed by Governor George Wallace and "Bull"Connor. In 1964 came the landmark civil rights legislationand the summer project of voter registration in Mississippi.The disturbances in Selma and Watts followed the next year,and in 1966 rioting broke out in several American cities,

although these events were not always driven by racial issues.By the mid-1960s the Civil Rights movement had split in two,with King retaining control of the nonviolent wing. On hisflank now appeared a militant wing consisting of separatists,Black Nationalists, and self-described Marxists who openlyadvocated violence and insurrection.

Paralleling these events were various other developments.Feminism became a discernible and active political movement with tlie appearance of Betty Friedan's Tlie FeminineMystique in 1963 and the founding of the National Organization of Women in 1966. William H. Masters and VirginiaE. Johnson published Human Sexual Response in the sameyear, and their research stood in the vanguard of a sexual(marriage and divorce) revolution, assisted in large part bythe introduction of an effective birth control pill. To SanFrancisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the mid-1960s camethe hippies, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane,and its emerging drug culture - popularized in musicallyrics - would rapidly spread across the nation and in fact theworld. On the opposite end of the counter cultural spectrumwere the radical politics of the New Left and such groups asthe Students for a Democratic Society (sds), which wouldreach their peak of influence around 1968. Fidel Castro,Ernesto Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, HerbertMarcuse, V. I. Lenin, and Karl Marx were the ideologicalsaints of the increasingly alienated political counter culture. Like many of the student movements in Europe, theNew Left and other radical groups in North America sawAmerican culture as suffering from greed and consumerismand manipulated by special interests, corporations, and themilitary-industrial complex.

All of these disparate forces came to a head in 1968, theyear that opened ominously with the capture of the USSPueblo, a surveillance ship, off the coast of North Korea. TheTet offensive followed at tlie end of January, and during thisperiod an estimated 60,000 Viet Cong forces crossed intothe south and attacked nearly every urban center, includingSaigon (where the U.S. Embassy came under assault). The"My Lai Massacre" - in which a platoon of soldiers underLt. William L. Calley Jr. slaughtered an estimated 450-500civilians - took place in March, although the full detailswould not be known for some time. The growing numberof American casualties provoked the antiwar candidacy ofEugene McCarthy, who mounted a direct challenge to aseated Democratic president. McCarthy's show of strengthin the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries forced President Johnson, on 31 March, to withdraw his bid for a secondterm in office.

407

MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

On 4 April, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, which prompted rioting in 110 cities and tlie call-up of 75,000 National Guardsmen. In all, tlie violent disturbances left thirty-nine more people dead. Meanwhile,Robert Kennedy, who had early deferred to McCarthy inmounting a challenge, changed his mind and jumped intothe presidential race. By early June he had taken over thelead in the race for his party's nomination, before he wasgunned down in Los Angeles. The summer saw only modest urban turmoil, that is, in comparison with the previousthree years. This relative calm, however, broke in Augustwhen Democrats converged on Chicago to hold their national convention. There the political delegates were metby a well-coordinated contingent of antiwar activists, BlackPower leaders, hippies, and the newly formed Yippies (YouthInternational Party) - the last of whom promised to lace tliecity's water supply with LSD and nominate a pig for president. All of the self-annointed celebrities of the political leftflocked to the event and the media limelight: Tom Hayden,Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg, amongmany others. The eventual nomination of Hubert Humphreyover McCarthy was in the end completely overshadowedby the "police riot" of tlie same evening that started whenbattle-weary police officers, not without considerable provocation, decided to clear out Grant Park and the surrounding area. It was an act of blue-collar retribution against thewhite-collar-bred protestors, indicative of another stratification within American society. The Democratic candidateHumphrey was defeated in November by the RepublicanRichard M. Nixon, but the scars that had divided tlie country along political, racial, economic, and generational lineswere now too deeply etched for any chance of reconciliation.It is not an exaggeration to say that the year had been oneof civil warfare, and contempt for the system felt by manyprotestors would never fully abate, nor would the woundsexperienced by both sides fully heal.

The unrest was no less evident within the universities,where, by one count, in the first six and a half months ofthe year over 100 campuses had suffered a total of 221 major demonstrations involving 39,000 students and faculty.16Buildings were being damaged and defaced, offices occupied and vandalized, presidents, deans, and professors accosted. Perhaps the most publicized of these disruptions wasthe rioting that took place at Columbia University in April,memorialized in an open letter by SDS president Mark Rudd(quoting LeRoi Jones) to university president Grayson Kirk:"Up against tlie wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up."17The ostensible reasons for the "stick-up" were plans for a

new gymnasium and Columbia's minor involvement withthe federal Institute of Defense Analysis. That these werepretexts was freely admitted by Rudd himself.18 Among hisstated motivations for the sit-ins were Vietnam, changes inthe draft regulations, the death of King, and tlie popularity of McCarthy on campus, which Rudd (an admirer of theCuban revolution) feared would lead to political co-optationback into the American electoral system. In any case, he didnot act alone. On 23 April, after he and others trashed thefence surrounding the planned gymnasium site, Rudd ledhis group of demonstrators to Hamilton Hall, where the acting dean of Columbia College, Harry Coleman, was takenas hostage. When later in the evening tlie black militantsamong the demonstrators demanded that the white SDSstudents depart this building, Rudd took his group to LowLibrary, where he occupied and vandalized the presidential office. Additional contingents of students successively"liberated" (occupied) various other buildings on campus,including Avery Hall, which housed the School of Architecture. Although Kirk quickly put the plans for the gymnasiumon hold, the event had already transcended itself. Prominentradicals from across the country rushed to the scene to announce their support for the protest. The occupation endedon 30 April when an exasperated Kirk asked the police toclear the buildings and arrest tlie trespassers. Many studentsleft without incident, but others barricaded the entrancesand sabotaged stairways, forcing a violent showdown. Over700 students and sympathetic outsiders were arrested. Theschool, physically and psychologically displaying the scarsof warfare, was mercifully shut down for the remainder ofthe academic year, only to reignite in the fall.

The American Civil War of 1968 would obviously leaveits imprint on architectural theory - if only psychologically.And its intensity can indeed be measured. The "gentle" retreats from modernism intimated by Venturi and Moore afew years earlier now seemed tame in relation to the currentupheaval, and the divide already evident within Americantheory - between American and European-inspired outlooks - would become even more prominent. In tlie firstregard, the "complexity and contradiction" advocated byVenturi transformed itself into full-blooded Las Vegas style"populism." Indeed Denise Scott Brown should take precedence over Venturi in this matter. She and Venturi weremarried on the front porch of her Santa Monica home inJuly 1967, one year after they had taken their first trip together to Las Vegas, and the West Coast years, as has beennoted, had also been fertile in furthering her intellectualdevelopment.19 In 1965 she taught a course at Berkeley with

408

EPILOGUE

the sociologist Melvin Webber, whose essay "The UrbanPlace and tlie Nonplace Urban Realm" had challenged theEuropean sociological assumptions that then formed the basis of urban theory. Against the model of the city as a centralactive hub from which all commercial and cultural activitiesdissipate outward, Webber offered a futuristic "communications systems" model in which electronic and other mediaaccess to information increasingly diminishes tlie importance of "place" and the need for human contact. Thusplace-based notions such as neighborhood, suburb, city, region, or nation gradually lose their relevance in an arealike the San Francisco Bay Region, where residents may"not participate in the metropolitan realm at all, their linkages being primarily with Washington or New York or HongKong or with their local-residence realms."20 This model,of course, preceded and presaged the access to communications and information offered by tools such as the Internetand the cell phone.

Scott Brown approached this theme from a slightly different perspective. In her 1965 essay published in the A.I.A.Journal, she analyzed the city as a "message system" usingthe categories of "Perception and Meaning," "Messages,""Movement and Meaning," and "A Modern Image," and sheposed the question of just how "messages" are given andreceived in the urban environment. Her tripartite answer -through "heraldry" (written and graphic signs), "physiognomy" (the sizes and shapes of buildings and spaces), and"location pattern" (the pattern of buildings and spaces) -echoes, as she herself notes, her former teacher DavidCrane's formulation in the "The City Symbolic" (1960). Butjust as importantly it provides a model for analyzing tliecontemporary noncore city, which developed following theintroduction of the automobile.21 Another key stimulus toher deliberations came in 1967 when she and Venturi werehired to teach a joint design studio at Yale, one that wouldentail both research and field investigation (and converselylittle design). The first of these special studios centered onthe theme of redesigning Herald Square, a New York Citysubway station, but the second, offered in the fall of 1968,carried the title "Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysisas Design Research." The third studio, taught the follow-ing year, drew upon the research of another Penn facultymember - Herbert J. Gans's work on Levittown.

The findings of the Las Vegas studio of 1968, which ofcourse included a field trip to Nevada, had been anticipatedmuch earlier by Scott Brown and Venturi. The article thatlater formed the basis for Part 1 of Learningfrom Las Vegas(1972) - "A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning

108. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, image of Las Vegas, from"A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas,"Architectural Forum (March 1968).

from Las Vegas" - was first published in ArchitecturalForum in March 1968 (Fig. 108). Appearing in the midstof global unrest, it was an important essay that in its ownodd way announced their secession from all earlier formsof modernism: "Architects," the two authors noted, "are out

409

MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at tlie environmentbecause orthodox Modern arcliitecture is progressive, if notrevolutionary, Utopian and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anythingbut permissive: architects have preferred to change tlie existing environment rather than enhance what is there.The cozy Italian piazza that American architects discoveredin the 1940s here becomes tlie foil for their new vision ofthe city: "Two decades later architects are perhaps ready forsimilar lessons about large open space, big scale, and highspeed."23 The new "big scale" of course is dictated by theautomobile, the big space by parking, and tlie heraldic signbecomes the crucial communicative element, "the buildingat back, a modest necessity."24 Las Vegas is, for Venturiand Scott Brown, not the city of fountains that AudreyHepburn learned to love but in an eerie way the city of thefuture.

The theme of Part 2 of Learning from Las Vegas alsoappeared in 1968, in a short article "On Ducks and Decoration." Loos's equation of decoration with "sin" has nowincreased tenfold: "Our thesis is that most architects' buildings today are ducks: buildings where an expressive aimhas distorted the whole beyond the limits of economy andconvenience; and that this, although an unadmitted one, isa kind of decoration and a wrong and costly one at that."25Scott Brown and Venturi now prefer the decorated shed, for"it permits us to get on with tlie task of making conventionalbuildings conventionally and to deal with their symbolicneeds with a lighter, defter touch."2 But this preferencecarries with it other interesting architectural implications:"We believe a new interest in the architecture of communication involving symbols and mixed media will lead us toreevaluate the eclectic and picturesque styles of the last century, to reappraise our own commercial architecture - Poparchitecture, if you wish - and finally to face the questionof decoration.""7

It was a point of view, obviously, that many Europeanswould never be willing to adopt. Vincent Scully's AmericanArchitecture and Urbanism and Robert A. M. Stern's New Directions in American Architecture created a mini-firestormin Britain when the two books alluded to such ideas: theformer because of what Martin Pawley termed "the irrelevance of the creative efforts catalogued in his [Scully's]book" and the latter because of the postscript, in which (ayoung) Stern opined that the future was being signified bythe student unrest at Columbia and Yale and by Venturiand Scott Brown's studies of Las Vegas: "The Attitude, thisanxiety over real problems, is as near to the new direc

tion as anything in this book."28 Pawley, after noting the"rent campuses, brawling streets and retributive trials" inthe United States, goes on to denounce the relevance ofVenturi's strip and then concludes that "if he represents thereal avant-garde in America, it will be the first time in history that the bearers of that proud title have sought refugein the Emperor's Palace instead of joining the revolution."29Venturi and Scott Brown responded with a tart rejoinder:"But we feel our pathetic, imperfect, expedient, limited, immediate, activist approach is more useful (or at least lessharmful) for the near future than is your reviewer's arrogant,authoritarian, sensational, simplistic, indulgent, condescending, apocalyptic, heroic, meaningless, easy, disastrousutopianism. ov

A more serious and no less livid response to Scott Brownwas touched off a few months later when Casabella published her article "Learning from Pop," together with a rejoinder by Kenneth Frampton and a reply by the author.31In "Learning from Pop," Scott Brown not only reiterated herearlier arguments regarding Las Vegas but peppered themwith comments on the failure of American urban renewalpolicies, which she traced back to "the 'rationalist,' Cartesian formal orders of latter day Modern architecture."32 Alsotaking a shot at futuristic British theorists of the 1960s, shenoted, "The forms of the pop landscape are relevant to usnow as were the forms of antique Rome to the Beaux-Arts,Cubism and machine architecture to the early Moderns, andthe industrial midlands and the Dogon to Team 10, whichis to say extremely relevant, and more so than tlie latestbathysphere, launch pad, or systems hospital (or even, 'pace'Banham, the Santa Monica pier)."33

Frampton, who had arrived in the United States a fewyears earlier from England, responded in his article witha lengthy attack on Scott Brown and Venturi, which heintroduced by juxtaposing images of the Vesnin brothers'design for tlie Pravda building (1923) and an aerial viewof the Las Vegas strip. Frampton's argument is elaboratelyconstructed. Leading with a quotation by Hermann Brochon the subtheme of "kitsch," he starts tlie text properby claiming, 'The recent writings of Denise Scott Brownand Robert Venturi extend the syncretic capacity of tlieEnglish picturesque tradition beyond its tractable limits."3His point is that tlie pop art polemics of these two designers are but a latter-day manifestation of tlie English pic-turesque/humanist/townscape movement of the late 1940sand early 1950s, mediated along tlie way by the analysesof Richard Hamilton, Kevin Lynch, Herbert Gans, MelvinWebber, and, most importantly, Madison Avenue. There is

410

EPILOGUE

as well a strong note of moral condemnation directed at theapostasy of Venturi and Scott Brown. On the one hand, "Design oriented expertise in Western European and Americanuniversities stands largely transfixed before the technicalprowess and success of Western Neo-Capitalism"; on tlieother hand, the "socio-political critical faculty" has beenseduced by "tlie so-called democratization of consumptionand by the inevitability of that, which I have elsewhere characterized as the 'instant Utopia' of Los Angeles." Framptonnext invokes the Marxist Herbert Marcuse on the ideological poverty of defining "the standard of living solely interms of automobiles, television sets and airplanes."3 Butaside from applauding the structuralist planning schemesof Candilis and Woods of the early 1960s, Frampton doesnot rush to the defense of CIAM determinism. Instead, hecloses with a threatening question: "Or is it that the presenttriumph of kitsch is testament in itself, without the illuminations of Pop Art, that our urban society is organized towardsself defeating ends, on a sociopolitical basis that is totallyinvalid?"37

Scott Brown's response to Frampton is equally revealingof the political dimensions of the theoretical divide. On thecultural front she makes the trenchant observation: "Themajority of the population may not like what Levitt offers,although there is no proof of this, but they support evenless the architects' alternatives. The critique of Madison Avenue is old now and a bore."38 Politically, the referenceto Marcuse provokes a more strident defense. Not only isthe "broad-gauge, European-based dismissal of the entireAmerican society over easy and not useful," but it is alsofundamentally disingenuous, for "there is something distasteful about sitting in a plush American university withenough financing to do one's thing full-time instead of part-time, as most European based architectural scholars must,and taking superior armchair-revolutionary pot shots at thecapitalists that support you there."39

In any case, by 1971, Frampton had indeed chosen sides,and it was not with Marcuse but with tlie circle of individualswho had come together at the Institute for Architecture andUrban Studies (iaus) in New York City. Here also is whereEuropean theory now mounts its counterattack.

The institute had been founded in early 1967, and historically it was related to CASE in that it grew out of Eisenman'sdissatisfaction with the lack of direction of that organization.Apparently sometime in 1966 Eisenman approached ArthurDrexler, who was the director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, and proposed the creation of an institute that would become a center

for studying urban problems. Drexler supported the idea, afew wealthy donors were found to provide startup funds,and in October 1967, at the first meeting of the trusteesfor the new institute, Eisenman was elected president andDrexler chairman of the board.40 The board is notablefor the absence of Colin Rowe, who up to this pointhad been working closely with Eisenman. If the institute's financial and ideological ties to the Museum ofModern Art recalls 1932, it should. MoMA would againwork closely with the new institute to shape its theoreticalposition.

The objectives of the iaus were multifaceted. One purpose was "to propose and develop new methods and new solutions for problems of the urban environment," but it wasalso intended to be an education center developing "newmethods for education and research in physical design andplanning."41 In addition it was "to develop a body of theoryconcerned with architecture and physical planning," drawing on the social sciences, and "to provide a new learningand work experience for students."42 Thus it was to functionas a design studio, with Eisenman and others securing city,state, and federal monies for projects; it was also to have afaculty who would lead the projects and conduct seminars.A library, exhibitions, and a journal were also anticipated.Eisenman performed his role in 1968 by securing municipaland federal funding for projects in New York and Baltimore.The original faculty consisted of Eisenman, Rowe, Drexler,and Robert Gutman.43 Also in 1968 Gutman, Emilio Am-basz, and Robert Slutzky were awarded Graham Foundationfellowships (John Entenza, a former Californian, was the director of the Graham Foundation as well as a board memberat the iaus).44

Obtaining students was another problem, and Eisenman'splan was to form relationships with university urban-studycenters whereby their students would be given a stipend towork temporarily in New York City. The first collaborationformed was with the Urban Design Group at Cornell University, headed by Colin Rowe and Alexander Caragonne,both of whom also came down to the city one day a weekto teach. The presence of Slutzky, Rowe, and Caragonne atthe iaus effectively reconstituted the Texas Rangers in theNortheast, but this coalition would soon shatter. In keeping with the spirit of 1968, students working at the iausin the fall began expressing their disapproval of Eisenman,the institute, and the disorganized nature of the projects.Eisenman, as Louis Martin has noted, interpreted the revoltas a power play by Rowe to take control of tlie institute, andsomewhat infamously he changed the locks on the doors to

411

MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

force Rowe and his students out. In March of the following year, Rowe and Caragonne resigned from the IAUS, afterefforts at mediation failed.

In 1969 and 1970 the ideological direction of tlie institute was also changing. Kenneth Frampton and StanfordAnderson were brought into the institute during these years.Audiotapes from a gathering that took place in 1969 -attended by Eisenman, Frampton, Anderson, Rykwert,Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and others - demonstrate that the IAUS (at this moment indistinguishable fromcase) functioned in part as a private club in which members critiqued the architectural work of fellow members.46These efforts soon culminated - on both a practical andtheoretical front - in two not unrelated ventures: thebook Five Arcliitects (1972) and the journal Oppositions(1973).

Although these ventures are outside of our time frame,they should be considered because they descend directlyfrom earlier efforts. Five Architects grew out of a casemeeting held at tlie Museum of Modern Art in May 1969, andit essentially launched a full-fledged Le Corbusier revival.47The five architects - Eisenman, Graves, Charles Gwathmey,John Hejduk, and Richard Meier - were at the early stages oftheir careers. The book contained three projects (two hypothetical, one unbuilt) of Hejduk, formerly a Texas Ranger, allof which had been exhibited at the Cooper Union in 1968.Gwathmey, who since 1970 had been in partnership withRobert Siegel, published his own cedar-sided house andstudio on Long Island (1966) and two similar residences inBridgehampton (1970). Graves displayed his HansehnannHouse, Fort Wayne (1967), and an addition to tlie Benac-erraf House in Princeton (1969). Richard Meier, who since1965 had enjoyed an increasingly successful practice, displayed his already well-publicized Smith House (1965) inDarien, Connecticut, and the Saltzman House, East Hampton (1967). Eisenman opened the catalogue with "House I,"Princeton (1967), and "House II," Hard wick, Vermont(1969).

The distinct Corbusian flavor of most of these designs(save Eisenman's) is consciously understated in the accompanying texts of both architects and critics. Meier, whosework of the early 1960s displayed overtones of Marcel Breuerand Mies, characterized the design of the Smith Houseas "a spatially layered linear system," thereby evoking atleast a faint homage to Rowe and Slutzky's notion of transparency and the Villa Stein at Garches.48 His use of expansive glass surfaces and Corbusian motifs - conceptualrather than functional - would of course intensify in the

early 1970s, at least with his residential designs. WilliamLa Riche, who introduced Graves's work, makes frequentmention of Le Corbusier, but he also compares Graves's designs to the cubism of Juan Gris, to the dislocation of aDavid Hockney painting, and to the representational valuesof Mircea Eliade.49 Kenneth Frampton, in his introductoryessay, "Frontality vs. Rotation," analyzes the work of thefive architects entirely from a formal perspective. He too acknowledges the "syntactical references to Le Corbusier" butinsists that "none of them manipulate space in a way thatat all resembles the work of Le Corbusier."30 A few yearslater, while acknowledging the presence of a "rehabilitatedPurism" in the work of the five, Frampton again argues thattheir "openness to the Spartan hedonism of Le Corbusier's aesthetic was restricted from the outset, and, in someinstances, had hardly ever existed. Their supposed involvement in post-Corbusean space was but a convenient wayof characterizing critically their common concern for thegeneration of highly abstract but lyrical formal systems."01One can quibble with this point, although it is nowmoot.

Only Rowe in his introductory essay - one of the mostimportant theoretical statements of the twentieth century -meets the underlying issues head on, by pronouncing thedeath of (politically) revolutionary modernism. Brashly, hedoes so in a way that is not entirely complimentary to thefive architects:

For we are here in the presence of what, in terms of the orthodox theory of modern architecture is heresy. We are in thepresence of anachronism, nostalgia, and, probably, frivolity. Ifmodern architecture looked like this c. 1930 then it should notlook like this today; and, if the real political issue of the presentis not the provision of the rich with cake but of the starvingwith bread, then not only formally but also programmaticallythese buildings are irrelevant Evidently they propound no obvious revolution; and, just as they may be envisaged as dubiously European to some American tastes, so they will seem thepainful evidence of American retardation to certain Europeanand, particularly, English judgments.52

Rowe, in fact, does not go on to supply the designs withany justification but merely allows their publication withinthe difficult "context of choices." In two paragraphs addedto his introduction in 1974, he makes his point even moreeloquently:

However, perhaps the great merit of what follows lies in thefact that its authors are not enormously self-deluded as to theimmediate possibility of any very violent or sudden architectural or social mutation. They place themselves in the role,

412

EPILOGUE

A Jounu for Idt-;« andCritreisrt. m Architfccture

Colin Row-vPetor EisenmanKenneth FramptonAnthony VidlerDiana AgrestMarin Gandelsonaa

Published by The In--titut..> forArchitecture aiid Urban Studifc

109. Title page from tlie first issue of Oppositions (September, 1973).

the secondary role of Scamozzi to Palladio. Their posture maybe polemical but it is not heroic. Apparently they are neitherMarcusian nor Maoist; and, lacking any transcendental sociological or political faith, their objective - at bottom - is toalleviate the present by the interjection of a quasi-Utopian veinof poetry.33

Arthur Drexler expresses the same sentiment more succinctly in his preface to Five Architects, when he notes thattheir work was "only architecture, not the salvation of man

and the redemption of the earth."54 In orthodox modernistterms of the 1920s, this intention of course constitutes a truesurrender.

If there was one theoretical position to be salvaged here,it was that of Eisenman, who had turned to Terragni forinspiration. Since 1967 he had been evolving tlie idea of"cardboard architecture," whose premises first appeared intwo Casabella articles published in 1970 and 1971.55 In thefirst (which reiterated much of his dissertation on Terragni),

413

MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY

Eisenman credits the Como architect with instituting a major shift over and above the work of Le Corbusier, "fromthe semantic domain to the syntactic domain: and from thetraditionally-held notions of the relation of the structure, inits technological sense, to form."36 In the second of thesearticles, "Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition," Eisenman squares this shift with Noam Chomsky'slinguistic model - tlie distinction between "a perceptual orsurface structure" (semantics) and "a conceptual or deepstructure" (syntactics). The idea behind "cardboard architecture" is to strip architecture entirely of its semanticconnotations and to view it as a closed notational system:"Cardboard is used to signify tlie result of the particularway of generating and transforming a series of primitiveinteger relationships into a more complex set of specific relationships which become the actual building. In this sense'cardboard' is used to denote the particular deployment ofcolumns, walls, and beams as they define space in a seriesof thin planar, vertical layers."58 Although he treats cardboard architecture as a "virtual or implied layering" of form,Houses I and II, as seen in Five Architects, are very muchan actual layering of planar and columnar forms. Rowe andSlutzky's notion of transparency has here been interpretedin an extreme way.

Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture represents another culmination of Case/iaus activities (Fig. 109). After two years of labor, tlie first issueappeared in September 1973 under the editorship ofEisenman, Frampton, and Mario Gandelsonas.59 The ideaof a journal, as we have seen, originated in 1965 with theCASE group, although its realization took a very differentform. The short editorial statement speaks only of the needfor "critical assessment and re-assessment" and claims thatthe aim of the journal is to "address itself to the evolutionof new models for a theory of architecture."60 The first issues contain essays by the three editors, tlie most importantof which (for suggesting a future direction) is the joint article by Gandelsonas and Diana Agrest entitled "Semioticsand Architecture: Ideological Consumption or TheoreticalWork." An essay of Rowe, written in the mid-1950s wasalso published, as was an article by Anthony Vidler, whowould soon join the editorial staff issue. Beginning with thethird issue, Julia Bloomfield would become tlie managingeditor.

The international cast of early contributors to Oppositions - Rowe, Frampton, Vidler, Agrest, Gandelsonas -is one of the distinguishing marks of the journal in its

early days, as is tlie distinctly ideological (political) slantof many of its analyses. This last tendency was strengthenedin the early 1970s through the association of the iaus withTafuri and Rossi - an association that resulted (somewhatoddly) in the work of the New York Five being includedin the 1973 Milan exhibition on "Rational Architecture."Eisenman may have wanted Oppositions to enhance criticaldiscussion within the United States, but the journal withits European orientation simply mirrored the long-standingpredilection of the Ivy League architectural schools, to import their faculty and intellectual fashions from abroad. Itsthematic fixation, aside from the work of the New York Five,was entirely on European theory and European architects -Le Corbusier, Soviet constructivism, and Italian rationalism,in particular. Once again, the Europhilic parallel with theefforts of the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 is striking, onlyless so because architecture by the end of the 1960s had become an international field in every way. On a historicaland theoretical front, the journal did make many valuablecontributions; it always functioned at a very high level in itspresentation of history and theory.

Looking back on tlie year 1968, if there was one idea thatbound together the iaus, tlie work of the New York Five,the populism of Venturi and Moore, and Italian rationalism,it was the idea of revival or revisitation: the revival of thenow iconic forms of the 1920s, of baroque mannerisms andpopular vernaculars, of an idealized, even Laugier-inspiredneoclassicism. This judgment is by no means intended to bea pejorative one, for revivals have always been an integralpart of modern theory and practice. Perrault's design forthe east facade of the Louvre, for instance, was as much aneffort to initiate a pseudosystyle revival as it was an attemptto articulate a French declaration of independence from theItalian Renaissance. Such is the circular nature of theoryand practice.

But revivals also occur at certain junctures, and this iswhat makes the phenomenon of 1968 (give or take a fewyears) so striking in retrospect. The pent-up postwar energythat progressively exploded in the realm of architecturaltheory during the 1950s and early 1960s, giving voice toa host of competing (and confident) ideologies and directions, visibly dissipates by the middle to late 1960s. Options,in fact, seem to disappear almost with each passing day, anda very real sense of cynicism sets in. The ongoing social andpolitical upheaval beyond the walls of the design studiosno doubt played a very important part in forcing a fundamental reevaluation of architecture's social and cultural

414

EPILOGUE

assumptions, but architecture too operates with a finitestorehouse of ideas and ideologies that also with a certainregularity exhaust themselves. If one wants to characterize 1968, one could well argue that above all else it was ayear of exhaustion - emotional, psychological, intellectual.

Whether one looks at tlie year as the beginning of the end ofmodern theory or simply as a period of retrenchment andcritical reassessment, it cannot be disputed that architectural theory would never again be the same. A new (or old)direction had to be found.

415

NOTES TO PAGES 400-408

132. Robert Venturi, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: 2.Selections from a Forthcoming Book," Perspecta 9/10 (1965):17 -56 . The i ssue was ed i t ed by Robe r t S te rn . 3 .

133. See John Summerson, "The Mischievous Analogy," in HeavenlyMansions and Other Essays on Architecture (London: CressetPress, 1949), 195-218.

134. Robert Venturi, "The Campidoglio: A Case Study," ArdiitecturalReview, vol. 113, 677 (May 1953): 333-4; reprinted in A Viewfrom the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953-1984 (New York:H a r p e r & R o w , 1 9 8 4 ) , 1 2 - 1 3 . 4 .

135. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 5.(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 22.

136. Ibid, 22, 26.137. Ibid., 25.138. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New

D i r e c t i o n s , 1 9 4 7 ) , " C o n t e n t s . " 6 .139. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 44.1 4 0 . I b i d . , 4 4 - 5 . 7 .141. Robert Venturi, "A Justification for Pop Architecture," Arts and

A r c l i i t e c t u r e , A p r i l 1 9 6 5 , 2 2 . 8 .142. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 48.143. Ibid, 49.144. Ibid, 52.145. Venturi, "A Justification for Pop Architecture," 22.146. On Denise Scott Brown, see David B. Brownlee's "Form and Con- 9.

tent," in Brownlee, De Long, and Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary, 10.3-89.

147. Scott Brown wrote several articles for the Journulofthe AmericanInstitute of Planners in the first half of the 1960s: "Form, Designand the City" (November 1962), "Natal Plans" (May 1964), and'The Meaningful City" (January 1965).

148. Scott Brown, "The Meaningful City"; reprinted and expanded inConnection 4 (spring 1967): 6-7, 12-14, 26-7, 50-1.

149. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 102.150. Ibid, 102-3.151. Ibid, 103.152. Foreword to Complexity and Contradiction, 11.1 5 3 . I b i d , 1 4 . 1 1 .154. Colin Rowe, "Waiting for Utopia," New York Tunes, 1967;

reprinted in Rowe, As I Was Saying, 2:75-8.155. Alan Colquhoun, "Robert Venturi," Architectural Design 37

( A u g u s t 1 9 6 7 ) : 3 6 2 . 1 2 .156. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. 13.

Giorgio Verrecchia (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 213. 14.157. Joseph Rykwert, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architec

ture," Domus, no. 453 (August 1967).158. Christian Norberg-Schulz, "Less or More?" Arcliitectural Review

143 (April 1968): 258. "His formal descriptions mainly follow 15.the path indicated by art historians such as Wolfflin, Frankl,Brinckmann, Wittkower, and Sedlmayr."

159. Ibid, 257.

E p i l o g u e 1 6 .

1. Of the many accounts of 1968, perbaps the best is David Caute, 17.The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968 (New York: 18.Harper & Row, 1988).

Alain Touraine, The May MovemeiU: Revolt and Reform, trans.Leonard F. X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971)."Motion of May 15, Strike Committee, Ecole des Beaux-Arts " inArcliitecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed.Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 457. See also DonaldDrew Egbert, 77ie Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and Martin Pawleyand Bernard Tschumi, 'The Beaux-Arts since '68," ArchitecturalDesign 61 (September 1971).See Caute, Year of the Barricades, 76.The best introduction to Tafuri and his ideas are the various essays appearing in the memorial double edition of Casabella, nos.619-620, (January-February 1995). See also Jean-Louis Colien,"La coupure entre architects et intellectuals, ou les enseigne-ments de l'italophilie," In Extenso 1 (1984): 182-223.Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans.Giorgio Verrecchia (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).Alberto Asor Rosa, "Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice," Casabella, nos. 619-620 (January-February 1995).Manfredo Tafuri, "Per una critica dcll'ideologia architettonica,"Contropiano, no. 1 (January-April 1969); translated by StephenSartarelli as 'Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology," inArchitecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000).Tafuri, Theories and History of Arcliitecture, 2.The following passage is indicative of Tafuri's historical manner:"We can say, therefore, that for Kahn too, history is only aningredient to be manipulated. He uses it to justify choices alreadymade or to shed semantic light, through the open allusion of thereferences, on values that aspire towards the symbol and theinstitution, but that, at die same time, try to open be open andreadable without betraying the code that rejects myths, symbolsand permanent institutions The historicism of the Kabnianschool harks back to the European myth of Reason: as such itbecomes a phenomenon opposed to the pragmatist Americantradition, balanced, by now, between a fun-fair irrationality anda guilty cynicism" (Theories and History of Architecture, 56-7).Tafuri 'Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology," 6. On Cac-ciari's ideas, see Massimo Cacciari Arcliitecture and Nihilism: Onthe Philosophy of Modern Ardiiteclure, trans. Stephen Sartarelli(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).Ibid, introductory remarks, 2.Ibid, 31.Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia (Bari: Laterza, 1973); translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta as Architecture and Utopia:Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,1976), 181.One excellent critique of its logical problems is Tomas Llorens,"Manfredo Tafuri: Neo-Avant-Garde and History," in On theMethodology of Architecture History, ed. Demetri Porphyrios,Architectural Design Profile (1981), 82-95. On his historiography, see Panayotis Tournikiotis, 7/ie Historiography of ModernArchitecture (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1999), 193-219.William Manchester, 77ie Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-1972 (Boston: Litde, Brown, 1973), 1131.Cited from Caute, Year of the Barricades, 166.Ibid, 172. In a speech given in Boston shortly after the Columbiaconfrontation, Rudd admitted that the connection with the

480

NOTES TO PAGES 408-414

Defense Department was "nothing at Columbia" and the gym- 37.n a s i u m i s s u e w a s " b u l l . " 3 8 .

19. See Deborah Fausch, The Context of Meaning Is Everyday Life:Venturi and Scott Brown's Theories of Architecture and Urban- 39.ism" (Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 1999), esp. 138-78. 40.

20. Melvin Webber, 'The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm," in Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin 41.Webber et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 42.1 9 6 4 ) , 1 4 0 . 4 3 .

21. Denise Scott Brown, "Messages," Connection 4 (spring 1967): 14; 44.reprinted from the aia Journal. Crane's essay, 'The City Sym- 45.bolic," appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners 26 (November 1960): 280-92.

22. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, "A Significance for A&P 46.Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas," Architectural Forum128 (March 1968): 37.

23. Ibid, 40.2 4 . I b i d , 3 9 . 4 7 .25. Denise Scott Brown & Robert Venturi, "On Ducks and Decora

tion," Arcliitecture Canada 45 (October 1968): 48. 48.2 6 . I b i d . 4 9 .2 7 . I b i d . 5 0 .28. First citation, Martin Pawley, "Leading from the Rear," ad, 51.

January 1970,46; second citation, Robert Stern, Neiv Directionsin American Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 116.

2 9 . P a w l e y , " L e a d i n g f r o m t h e R e a r , " 4 6 . 5 2 .30. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, letter in response to 53.

"Lead ing f rom the Rear, " AD, Ju ly 1970, 370 . 54 .31. Casabella, nos. 359-360 (1971). This was a special issue devoted 55.

to 'The City as Artefact" organized by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and il contained essays by Peter Eisen- 56.man, Joseph Rykwert, Stanford Anderson, and Tom Schumacher,a m o n g o t h e r s . 5 7 .

32. Denise Scott Brown, "Learning from Pop," Casabella, nos. 359-3 6 0 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 5 . 5 8 .

3 3 . I b i d , 1 7 . 5 9 .34. Kenneth Frampton, "America 1960-1970: Notes on Urban Im

ages and Theory," Casabella, nos. 359-360 (1971): 25.35. Ibid, 33.3 6 . I b i d , 3 6 . 6 0 .

Ibid.Denise Scott Brown, "Reply to Frampton," Casabella, nos. 359-360 (1971): 43.Ibid, 44-5.The pertinent documents are in the cca Archives, Montreal, Series A, file A-l.Ibid, "Policies and Procedures," 14 April 1969, pde/A/4, 1.Ibid.Ibid, "Faculty 1967-1968," pi>e/A/4.Ibid, trustee meeting 4 November 1968, Scries A, file A-l.Noted by Louis Martin, 'The Search for a Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American Debates, 1957-1976" (Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 2002), 554-6.Transcripts of the two audiotapes are in the iaus central file (Lot3 086, folder Bl-4) of the cca collection. Martin (n. 45, p. 557)says that they were transcribed for a book that Eisenman wantedto title Cardboard Architecture.Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (nopublication data, 1974?).Ibid, 111.Ibid, 39-41, 55.Ibid, 12.Kenneth Framption, introduction to Ricliard Meier, Arddtect:Buildings and Projects 1966-1976 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1976), 8.Five Architects, 4.Ibid, 8.Ibid, 1.Martin discusses this notion ami its genesis extensively in TheSearch for a Tlieory in Architecture," 552-68, 589-98.Peter Eisenman, "From Object to Relationship: The Casa delFascio by Terrgni," Casabella 344 (January 1970): 38.Peter Eisenman, "Notes on Conceptual Arcliitecture: Towards aDefinition," Casabella, nos. 359-360 (1971): 51.Quotation from Five Architects, 15.On the history of the journal, see Joan Ockman, "Resurrectingthe Avant-Garde: The History and Program of Oppositions," inArchiteclureproduction, cd. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 180-99.Editorial statement, Oppositions 1 (September 1973).

481