Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde

by K. Michael Hays

While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general theory of that ethos. Now, in Architecture's Desire, K. Michael Hays writes an account of the "late avant-garde" as an architecture systematically twisting back on itself, pondering its own historical status, and deliberately exploring architecture's representational possibilities right up to their absolute limits. In close readings of the brooding, melancholy silence of Aldo Rossi, the radically reductive "decompositions" and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman, the carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk, and the "cinegrammatic" delirium of Bernard Tschumi, Hays narrates the story of architecture confronting its own boundaries with objects of ever more reflexivity, difficulty, and intransigence.

The late avant-garde is the last architecture with philosophical aspirations, an architecture that could think philosophical problems through architecture rather than merely illustrate them. It takes architecture as the object of its own reflection, which in turn produces an unrelenting desire. Using the tools of critical theory together with the structure of Lacan's triad imaginary-symbolic-real, Hays constructs a theory of architectural desire that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.

Genres: Architecture, Theory

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2009

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, this book is based on research conducted for a series of seminars taught by Hays at Harvard, and one at OSU which I was a part of. I thoroughly enjoyed Hays' take on what he calls the "late avant-garde," but found his application of psycho-babble -- via Lacan -- more than tiresome.

That being said, his use of Lacan was far more subtle and precise in this text, an accomplished piece of criticism and history, stretching for a theoretical construct to encompass all these architects produced.

Throughout, Hays uses "The City" as metaphor for architecture's desiring object, and draws together Rossi's writings, Eisenman's "Artificial Excavations", Hejduk's city masques, and Tschumi's "La Villette" as examples of architectures constructed by and constructing of the city.

In Rossi, Eisenman, Hejduk and Tschumi, Hays starts with a quadrangle and ends, unsurprisingly, with a line. These architects' approaches to the city were increasingly more complex and subtle, terminating not with La Villette's event-producing machine, but with Koolhaas' New York.

Koolhaas' work, writes Hays, has always been dependent upon "an insistence on the relationship between the randomness and contingency of experience and the presence of some architecturally inert, nondifferential technical apparatus that nevertheless propels the differentiation of what goes on around it." I can't think of a better description of the city than that.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact that this has taken me the better part of 2011 and that I kind of gave up the heavy thinking 2/3rds of the way through and just focused on the broad concepts, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I've always had a passion for architecture, but I'm generally limited to an intuitive understanding of what I see in front of me. Academic studies such as this add a more rigorous aspect to my understanding, which I really appreciate even if I'm disinclined to seek them out all that often.

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