K. Michael Hays

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Nouvel

Robert Bononno

A revelatory conversation between two major figures in visual culture.

The Singular Objects of Architecture

Forty-seven of the primary texts of contemporary architecture theory, introducing each by detailing the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation.

Architecture Theory Since 1968

Aaron Betsky

Whitney Museum of American Art

RoseLee Goldberg

Laurie Anderson

Diller + Scofidio

Jordan Crandall

Ashley Schafer

Among the most talked-about names in contemporary architecture, the firm of Diller + Scofidio has for the last two decades redefined what architecture can be. Through site-specific, highly conceptual works such as the acclaimed redesigns of the famed Brasserie restaurant in New York City's Seagram Building, to the "Blur" building, created for the Swiss Expo 2002 and composed entirely of mist, the firm has consistently challenged and expanded the role of architecture and design in our technology-oriented environment. In this first-ever comprehensive survey of the work of this internationally recognized firm, published to accompany an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, 10 of Diller + Scofidio's most important site-specific pieces are eamined, along with several of the artifacts they have created in order to examine issues of gender, surveillance, place, and travel. With essays by respected scholars and a contribution by contemporary artist Laurie Anderson, this fully illustrated volume offers a compelling look at the work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.'

The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio

Scanning

Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective. 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.

Reading the Late Avant-Garde

Architecture's Desire

Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.

The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer

Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject

Eran Neuman

Preston Scott Cohen

For architecture, the Tel Aviv Museum of Arts Paul and Herta Amir Building provides a new spatial and tectonic paradigm; for museology, it represents a new approach for resolving tensions between divergent cultural agendas. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an unusual synthesis of two opposing paradigms of the contemporary museum: the museum of neutral white boxes dedicated to aesthetic contemplation and the museum of architectural spectacle, a site of public excitation. Rather than being concentrated in a grand lobby or atrium, the public spaces of the building are dispersed, becoming sites for artistic interventions. A series of rectangular galleries are organized around the lightfall, a twenty-six-meter tall spiraling atrium that organizes the building according to multiple axes that deviate significantly from floor to floor. The geometry and organization of the building stimulates curatorial imagination, proving that architectural and museological space can be simultaneously segregated, contiguous, and synthesized.

Genealogy of a Museum: Paul and Herta Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Lightfall

Oppositions, founded in September 1973 and discontinued in 1984, was a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture published by the now-defunct Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. Editors Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, and Mario Gandelsonas assembled essays by leading architecture practitioners and theorists. The earliest issues are now collectors' items, and the journal continues to influence each new generation of architects.The Oppositions Reader collects the most important essays from the 11 year history of Oppositions.

K. Michael Hays

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