Anthony Vidler

inventing architectural modernism

Histories of the immediate present

How psychological ideas of space have profoundly affected architectural and artistic expression in the twentieth century. Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias. This space is not empty but full of disturbing forms, including those of architecture and the city. The second kind of warping is produced when artists break the boundaries of genre to depict space in new ways. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space from Pascal and Freud to the identification of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the nineteenth century to twentieth-century theories of spatial alienation and estrangement in the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Focusing on current conditions of displacement and placelessness, he examines ways in which contemporary artists and architects have produced new forms of spatial warping. The discussion ranges from theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze to artists such as Vito Acconci, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, and Rachel Whiteread. Finally, Vidler looks at the architectural experiments of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, and Eric Owen Moss in the light of new digital techniques that, while relying on traditional perspective, have radically transformed the composition, production, and experience—perhaps even the subject itself—of architecture.

Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

Warped Space

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical--serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical--opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart. Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture--its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness. Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.

Essays in the Modern Unhomely

The Architectural Uncanny

Anne Rice

Stephen King

Michel Foucault

Judith Halberstam

William Gibson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Andrew O'Hagan

Umberto Eco

Slavoj Žižek

Sigmund Freud

Jean Baudrillard

Mike Kelley

Beatriz Colomina

James Sampson Meyer

Mary Shelley

Patrick McGrath

Jeff Wall

Jacques Lacan

Marina Warner

Hal Foster

Jerry Saltz

Damien Hirst

Amelia Jones

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Nancy Spector

Julia Kristeva

Edmund Burke

Mark Edmundson

Richard Dyer

Bret Easton Ellis

Edgar Allan Poe

Richard Davenport-Hines

Douglas Crimp

Gianni Jetzer

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Carol J. Clover

Trevor J. Fairbrother

Elisabeth Bronfen

Bruce Hainley

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Kate Ferguson Ellis

Kobena Mercer

Stan Douglas

Alex Farquharson

Jane D. Marsching

Mark Alice Durant

Nike Bätzner

Michael Cohen (kustos.)

Tacita Dean

Christoph Grünenberg

Jonathan Jones (likovni kritik.)

Shamim Momin

Andrew Ross (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis.)

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies. This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of the Gothic in contemporary art, providing the first comprehensive overview of its uses within contemporary visual culture. The Gothic includes artists' writings by Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese and Catherine Sullivan, complemented by literary extracts from Horace Walpole, William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen King, and theoretical writings by such key thinkers as Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek. Artists surveyed include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Sue de Beer, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion, Stan Douglas, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Teresa Margolles, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Gregor Schneider, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Writers include Jean Baudrillard, Elizabeth Bronfen, Edmund Burke, Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Douglas Crimp, Jacques Derrida, Richard Dyer, Umberto Eco, Bret Easton Ellis, Trevor Fairbrother, Alex Farquharson, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, Christoph Grunenberg, Bruce Hainley, Judith Halberstam, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Jones, Mike Kelley, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Patrick McGrath, Kobena Mercer, James Meyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Andrew Ross, Jerry Saltz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mary Shelley, Nancy Spector, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Vidler, Jeff Wall, Horace Walpole, Marina Warner, Anne Williams and Slavoj Žižek.

The Gothic

Leon Krier

Rational Architecture

How the different narratives of four historians of architectural modernism—Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri—advanced specific versions of modernism. Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context. Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the “Renaissance modernism” of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse—and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectual experiments of the postwar period.

Inventing Architectural Modernism

Histories of the Immediate Present

Dan Cameron

Paul McCarthy

"Working from a pioneering fusion of sculpture and conceptually based performance, Paul McCarthy is one of the most influential, yet least recognized artists in the U.S. today. While his architectural installations incorporating video and performance artifacts have received critical and curatorial attention during the present decade, few viewers are familiar with his artistic evolution, or with the impact his work has had on two generations of Los Angeles artists. This publication, covering about 400 works from all areas of his activity, gives an exemplary insight into McCarthy's works from the early 1970s up to the present day. Experts on his work give comprehensive descriptions and analyses of the American artist's performances and installations, examine the unique ties between his works and cinema, and explore the dialogue between New York and Los Angeles, particularly in the formulation and development of conceptual art."--Publisher's description

Susan Stewart

William John Thomas Mitchell

Antony Gormley

Anthony Gormley is widely recognised as one of the most imaginative and original artists working in the UK today. This illustrated book accompanies the exhibition Anthony Gormley: Blind Light at The Hayward, the artist's first major showing in London in over 25 years. Since the 1980s Gormley has focused consistently on the human figure, often using his own body as the starting point for works that explore our perception of space, architecture, and bodily presence. Alongside specially commissioned photography of Gormley's major new projects, the book includes an original visual essay by the artist that elaborates his aesthetic preoccupations with images selected from his own photographic archive. Essays from leading writers and scholars Anthony Vidler, Susan Stewart and W. J. T. Mitchell provide a context in which to understand Gormley's new work, while an in-depth interview with The Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff and co-curator Jacky Klein reconsiders Gormley's place within contemporary culture and the history of art.

Blind Light

Thom Mayne

Anthony Robins

Tony Robins

Morphosis Architects

Winners of numerous awards and the subject of exhibitions from Tokyo to Berlin, Morphosis is one of the most influential American architecture firms of the last two decades. Rizzoli has published the firm's highly successful first two monographs; like its predecessors, Morphosis: Buildings and Projects, Volume 3 reflects the firm's avant-garde approach to design with computer-generated images in a hypertextual presentation that radically departs from conventional architectural monographs. Along with new built, unbuilt, and in-progress projects, furniture design, and sketches, the book includes the FJC Communications building in Burbank, California; Sun Towers in Seoul; the A.S.E. Visitors' Center in Taipei; and the American Business Center in Berlin.

Buildings and Projects, 1993-1997

Morphosis

Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin has made contributions as an artist and cultural theorist for more than three decades. His writings on general issues such as photographic, psychoanalytic and cultural theory are noted for their lucidity, compactness and reason. In contrast, the photographs and videos that Burgin creates as an image-maker are paradoxical and constitute an inquiry into the structure of meaning in contemporary society.

Shadowed

Lebbeus Woods

Peter Noever

Manuel De Landa

"This publication - published for the exhibition of the same name is the MAK Vienna - documents the various works comprising the System Wien project. It develops an idea that the making of architecture can be understood as the organization of energy. The project explores how energy relations in public and private city spaces might be represented tectonically in the form of drawings and installations; how existing energy relations in the city can be changed by the input of new energy in the form of highly temporary spatial interventions; and how the future of the city need not depend for creative energy input on the development of building projects requiring large capital investments and institutional approval, but rather on the redistribution of energy at the human scale of the street and the room."--BOOK JACKET.

... Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition, MAK Vienna Wien, 29.06. - 16.10.2005

Lebbeus Woods, System Wien

Peter Wollen

Ralph Rugoff

Hammer Museum

University of California, Los Angeles. Armand Hammer Museum

Fellows of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center

The book is not about works of art that simply document criminal acts. Rather, it is about a strain of art that presents the art object as a clue to absent meanings or actions.

Scene of the Crime

Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment

The Writing of the Walls

La deformazione dello spazio. Arte, architettura e disagio nella cultura moderna

Anthony Vidler

About

Books

Join the club