Architecture Theory Since 1968 - Review

Architectural Review, The, August, 1999 by Colin Davies

Edited by K. Michael Hays. London: MIT Press 1998. [pounds]44.95

In the US, architectural theory (or architecture theory as it is known there) has become a kind of self-contained economy, producing books, articles and paper projects for consumption by post-graduate students who then produce more books, articles and paper projects. Its relevance to architectural practice is slight and architects don't usually find any need for it.

According to K. Michael Hays, this divorce between architecture and architecture theory happened in the late 1960s when historical and critical methods that were indigenous to architecture were supplanted, in academic circles at least, by 'the importation and deployment of both structuralist and phenomenological thought'. That was when architecture theory left home and set up on its own. Many would see this as a regrettable development, but Hays has no time for 'tedious laments about the relevance of theory'. He has a lot invested in this particular economy so he is not about to undermine it. On the contrary, his job is to promote its growth and one way to do this is to

catalogue its products in an 800 page anthology that can go straight onto the reading lists of all those post-graduate courses.

So we have 47 texts spanning 25 years, from Manfredo Tafuri, Colin Rowe and Denise Scott Brown to Jeffrey Kipnis, Anthony Vidler and Jennifer Bloomer. Each text is furnished with a commentary by Hays designed to place it historically and indicate connections with other texts. Hays' glosses are sometimes more difficult to read than the texts themselves and often have a higher proportion of footnotes, so this is definitely not a beginner's introduction. Another curious feature is that the texts are laid out chronologically rather than thematically (the method preferred, for example, by Kate Nesbitt in a rival anthology) as if there existed a perfect system of communication between theorists all over the world and ideas developed everywhere at an even pace. And why is the period fixed at 1969-1993, which excludes Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Rossi's Architecture of the City at one end, and a number of important feminist critiques at the other?

The texts are interspersed with pictorial presentations of 12 seminal architectural projects, including two milestone MOMA exhibitions. The depth of the rift between theory and practice can be gauged from the fact that these presentations include only one picture of a completed building - a fuzzy construction progress shot of Stirling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

COLIN DAVIES