Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s 1517901618, 9781517901615

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GRAPHIC ASSEMBLY

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GRAPHIC ASSEMBLY Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s

CRAIG BUCKLEY

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Portions of the Introduction and chapter 2 were previously published in a different form in Grey Room, no. 73 (Fall 2018). Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in a different form in “From Absolute to Everything: Taking Possession in ‘Alles ist Architektur,’ ” Grey Room, no. 28 (Summer 2007): 108–­22. Portions of chapter 5 were previously published in a different form in “Superstudio’s Aberrant Images,” in and Materials, Money, and Crisis, ed. Alexander Scrimgeour, Richard Birkett, and Sam Lewitt (Vienna: MuMOK, 2014).

Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buckley, Craig, author. Graphic assembly : montage, media, and experimental architecture in the 1960s/ Craig Buckley. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022887 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0161-5 (hc/j : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Europe—History—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Europe—History—20th century. | Montage. Classification: LCC NA958 .B83 2019 | DDC 720.94/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022887

CONTENTS

Introduction: Envisioning Assembly

1

1 Clipping: The Promiscuous Attachments of Reyner Banham

33

2 The Infamous Plug: Archigram’s Screen Architecture

73

3 Everything Is Architecture: Hans Hollein’s Media Assemblages

125

4 Disassembling Paris: Utopie circa 1968

185

5 Scenarios and Counterscenarios: Superstudio’s Mediascapes

241



291

Epilogue: Image as Assemblage

Acknowledgments

301

Notes

305

Index

371

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INTRODUCTION Envisioning Assembly

Now that printing has ceased to constitute the major basis for teaching and learning and is no longer the dominant technological form of our world, there is much more printing than ever before. —­Marshall McLuhan, “Electronics and the Changing Role of Print”

In 1972 a young architect looked back on his experience of the 1960s. What he recalled was the importance of printed images. For an emerging generation, he noted, the ability to affect architectural culture depended less on the realization of buildings than on a capacity to mobilize particular media. Almost simultaneously at various places in the world, be it Japan, England, or Austria, this discussion was started. It had to be provoked. To do this, to give this discussion the broadest possible base, certain means and media were developed—­“independently,” but rather similar. I want to label them evocative images. Plug-­in cities with cranes hovering, walking cities, cities of giant trusses between giant Doric columns, an aircraft-­carrier-­city in a landscape.1

The architect was Hans Hollein, and the images to which he alluded have since become well known. They included his own Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape (1964), Arata Isozaki’s Future City (Incubation Process) (1962), and Ron Herron’s A Walking City (1964). Emerging from Vienna, Tokyo, and London, the images cited by Hollein testify to the formation of a trans­ national network linking a younger generation of architects during the 1960s. There was nothing inherently new about such global relationships. Since the 1

FIGURE I.1. Hans

Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, 1964. Project perspective. Cut-­and-­ pasted reproduction on four-­part photograph mounted on board, 8½ × 39⅜ inches. Philip Johnson Fund. Copyright Hans Hollein; digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

later nineteenth century, the expanded circulation of photographic images printed in magazines and books had fostered an increasing awareness of the contemporaneity of architectural developments in distant places. Yet the postwar period witnessed a transformation, at once in the media techniques used by architects and in the characteristics of such print-­based networks. The images cited by Hollein did not aim to illustrate an approach or reinforce an argument but to evoke: to call up an emotion or bring a feeling into being. Looking at these works together reveals that this evocative capacity rested on something particular: Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, Isozaki’s Future City, and Herron’s Walking City were all photomontages. The present volume asks why such a conceptual technique became so pervasive in postwar architectural culture and examines its pivotal role in forging the international network of experimental architectural practice that emerged during the long 1960s. Each of the photomontages cited by Hollein extracted fragments of drawings or photographs, which were transposed and recombined to form an alien landscape. Herron’s initial drawings of Walking City feature colossal architectural vehicles inspired by the decaying Shivering Sands antiaircraft forts in the Thames estuary, which appeared regularly in British newspapers reporting on the pirate radio station that began broadcasting from these platforms that spring.2 Herron decided to publish them in photomontage form, inserting his lumbering vehicles into a grainy enlargement of Lower Manhattan, a new city confronting an old one after a trans­

2 INTRODUCTION

atlantic crossing. Isozaki’s Future City repurposed fragments of the architect’s joint-­core drawings—­a trabeated urban building system the architect had developed in the office of Kenzō Tange. This superstructure was designed to contend with the massive postwar growth of Tokyo, yet in the photo­montage it was conjoined with the ruins of a Doric temple, which looms gloomily above a multilane highway and pedestrian bridges.3 Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier transplanted the USS Forrestal—­the first of a new class of postwar supercarriers developed for jet aircraft—­from the high seas to the rolling hills of Austria’s rural Bürgenland. The landscape was part of a little-­developed hinterland along the border of Hungary that had become a militarized zone along the metaphorical “iron curtain” dividing Cold War Europe. Emphasizing abrupt displacements and stark manipulations of scale, such paper giants highlighted collisions between old and new, mobility and stasis. The incongruous conjunctions found in such photomontages evoked alienation, collapse, and spatial dislocation, rather than the assurance of new beginnings or the expansive confidence in technology associated with emerging concepts of megastructure in architectural culture. The war machines, ruins, and robots populating these composite landscapes were indices of a brewing cultural and political volatility, ambiguous reminders of the rapid transformations associated with the postwar consumer economy, the unprecedented mobility of people and information, and anxieties about planetary destruction at the height of the Cold War.

3 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.2. Arata Isozaki, Future City (Incubation Process), 1962. Ink and printed paper on paper, 22 × 14.7 cm. Copyright Arata Isozaki & Associates.

Hollein’s, Isozaki’s, and Herron’s images were not conceived as renderings, private exercises, or competition entries; each was a project in its own right. Their task was to circulate: to be combined with other images on a page, to be projected during lectures, exhibited in galleries, featured in films or on television broadcasts. Extracting and reassembling materials from globally disseminated illustrated magazines, they set these materials back in altered circulation by means of little magazines, exhibitions, and films that traveled in the shadow of these larger publications.4 More than anything these architects had built at the time, it was arguably the mobility of such media, and the reactions they solicited, that set their careers in motion. Yet these media operations were also material things: printed pictures assembled from pieces of other printed pictures. A finer-­grained account of them as media artifacts has the potential to raise a different set of questions. The best-­known version of Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, was created from a carefully cutout reproduction of the USS Forrestal and inserted into a nearly seamless panoramic landscape created from four photographic prints pieced together on the diagonal. The photographs are affixed to a tattered cardboard support marked by traces of tape, glue, pencil notations, and crop marks. The material details surrounding this unsettling pastoral were meant to remain invisible, yet they are crucial pieces of evidence. They are reminders that this was a working object, a relic from the reproduction process that has come to acquire the auratic qualities of an original. Hollein’s photomontage can be seen more precisely as what printers called a “pasteup,” a technique widely used during

FIGURE I.3. Ron

Herron, A Walking City, Archigram 5, 1964. Offset lithographic print. Copyright 2017 Archigram and Ron Herron, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

5 INTRODUCTION

these years to prepare materials for reproduction in print. The pasteup was a surface on which a wide array of things could be transferred, fitted, glued, and overlaid, from photographs and magazine clippings to typewriter texts, transfer lettering, ink, adhesive colors, screen-­tone patterns, graphite, diagrams, and more. Like so many of the works that figure in this book, Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape highlights how the legacy of montage was remobilized within the technical space of the pasteup during the 1960s, a condition that calls for looking closely at the ways architects operated in this domain and how, in turn, this domain shaped their thinking. As media relics, they invite a reconsideration of the role played by changing technologies in the enduring power of montage. Such a conceptual technique was decisive for Hollein and his network of contemporaries, yet it remains equally crucial for understanding the historical dynamics and technological shifts that have bound architectural culture ever more closely to photomechanical media. By attending to the texture of such media procedures—­in the broadest sense of the term—­together with the conflicts surrounding them, Graphic Assembly aims to rethink the history and the afterlives of some of the iconic projects that have come to stand for this period.

Montage, Collage, Assembly Montage has long been a central term for critical reflection on the impact of industrial modernity on culture across disciplines as varied as film, photography, poetry, architecture, and music. Subject to a diverse range of historical interpretations, it is important to situate this book’s use of the term. Photomontages are typically defined as composite images combining two or more photomechanical elements of diverse origins to form a new and different image for further reproduction.5 The technical procedures used in photo­montage date back to the nineteenth century, yet the term and concept emerged out of, and in tension with, avant-­garde collage practice in the first decades of the twentieth century.6 In contrast to photomontages, collages were composed primarily from nonphotographic elements such as colored paper, printed matter, or wallpaper, and were conceived as unique works concerned with composition, texture, and form. There are considerable overlaps within this composite tradition, as the borderline case of photocollage—­an image composed of partially photomechanical materials without the intent of further reproduction—­indicates. In what follows, collage and montage are treated as technically and materially distinct media, without being understood as strictly separate formal systems.7 These familiar definitions and 6 INTRODUCTION

technical distinctions are only a part of the book’s framework. The preference for the term montage rather than photomontage reflects the fact that the book engages both two-­dimensional composite media and three-­dimensional buildings, as well as other entities—­such as films, models, competition entries, exhibitions, and audiovisual environments—­that exist somewhere in between. Montage was a key, though largely overlooked, cultural technique in the broad spectrum of architectural design practice, and an architectural account of it calls for an approach sensitive to the role that montage played in translating concepts between two and three dimensions.8 Such translations did not operate in one direction only. If montage procedures condensed complex three-­dimensional entities into composite two-­dimensional surfaces, they also served to conceive three-­dimensional structures and interiors from effects registered in two dimensions. The beginnings of avant-­garde photomontage are commonly traced back to the context of Berlin Dada after World War I, yet the technique was adopt­ed almost simultaneously by constructivist artists and filmmakers in the Soviet Union.9 To appreciate how the term montage came to signify techniques for manipulating photomechanical materials, it helps to revisit its ety­mology with an eye toward the different technics invoked in its changing definitions.10 Montage, derived from the French verb monter, includes two distinct yet interlinked senses: elevation and assembly. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751–­72) cited montage as a boatmen’s term: “l’action de celui qui remonte & facilite le montage de bateaux.”11 Such a definition is notably ambiguous. While it could possibly denote assembly, the reference to the repetitive actions of boatmen (“celui qui remonte & facilite le montage”) suggests the circulation of boats and their cargo. Such an interpretation would be consistent with the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’académie française, which defines montage as the movement of goods, such as grain or wood, to a higher position.12 As to the verb monter, the examples in the Encyclopédie mostly emphasized elevation, except within the vocabulary of goldsmiths, cutlers, and jewelers, who used monter to refer to assembly.13 Definitions from nineteenth-­century dictionaries point to the expansion and generalization of such a meaning. Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1874) defines montage as the disposition of machine parts in a desired order, while the Trésor de la langue française (1876) describes the use of cords, cranes, and windlasses to hoist building materials into place.14 By the early twentieth century, montage came to refer not only to elevation, arrangement, and construction but to “chaînes de montage”: the assembly 7 INTRODUCTION

lines that systematically organized industrial labor to achieve maximum efficiency. Such definitions continually point to different kinds of labor, from transportation and the working of intricate pieces to the strenuous lifting and fitting together of building parts. Yet they also trace a series of deterritorializations and displacements. As montage comes to signify assembly more than elevation, it also becomes increasingly abstract and generalized, a set of operations whose logic and requirements hinge no longer on specific trades, know-­how, or places, or even on the nature of the object being assembled, but on the means, methods, and efficiencies of the process itself. When artists mobilized terms such as montieren, monteur, and montage to describe the assembly of reproducible photomechanical patterns and typo­graphical elements in the years after World War I, they further generalized the connotations of such mechanized assembly, transferring them to procedures associated with paper and film. The assertion that manipulating the products of cameras, enlargers, and mass-­printing processes be understood as a type of industrial operation played a crucial role in differentiating the monteur from the bourgeois artist, and thus montages from the collages and papiers collés of cubism and futurism. The Dadaist Hans Richter’s recollection can be taken as typical: “We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as construction: we assembled our work, like a fitter.”15 To polemically embrace the work of fitters and noncreative assemblers, workers with no claim to have invented what they put together was to affirm a lack of originality. In the context of Berlin Dada, such deflation flouted semantic conventions and explicitly attacked bourgeois ideas of creative invention as criteria for judging a work of art. Richter’s reference to the engineer as well as the fitter was telling. The association of montage with engineering was central to the constructive, rather than destructive, connotations the concept increasingly assumed in the interwar years, one that was crucial to both Soviet constructivism and the work of Lázsló Moholy-­Nagy, whose influential Bauhaus publications, Malerei Fotographie Film (1925) and Von Material zu Architektur (1929), helped codify and disseminate concepts of montage for an international readership.16 Connected to this ambiguity was the fact that photomontage denoted starkly different pictorial forms. The term was applied to the aggressively fragmented works of early Dada, in which a multiplicity of disconnected photographic and typographical fragments coalesced in defiance of perspectival coherence. Yet it was equally applied to virtually seamless compositions, whether perspectival or not, where parts of disparate origin were merged so subtly that their differences became barely perceptible. If the use of montage to describe graphic assembly echoed the 8 INTRODUCTION

displacement of skilled work by repetitive factory operations, the comparison of image and page to shop floor and construction site also marked out a latent empathy with physical building procedures. The analogy between graphic construction and three-­dimensional assembly was unstable, poised between flattening and abstraction, on the one hand, and the putting together of three-­dimensional structures, on the other. The constructive interpretation of montage has tended to be dominant in architectural culture, yet there remains a strong sense of ambivalence and contradiction internal to such techniques. While there has been growing interest in montage in architectural history in recent years, the field has lacked any larger comparative effort to consider the significance of montage as a visual, intellectual, and media historical problematic.17 The work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who began using photo­montage early in his career and continued to experiment with it throughout his life, has been central to recent research on the topic. Scholars such as Beatriz Colomina, Neil Levine, Detlef Mertins, Martino Stierli, and Claire Zimmerman have shed light on these works and indeed reappraised Mies’s legacy through conceptual frameworks drawn from his montages and collages.18 Another significant area of research has come from scholars working on interwar photomurals. As the work of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Romy Golan, Daniel Nagele, and Ulrich Pohlmann has shown, the complex spaces created by means of photomurals for popular exhibitions were closely bound up with propaganda campaigns associated with various ideologies, from fascism in Germany and Italy to the rise of Stalinism in the USSR, to the Popular Front government in France.19 As the relative recentness of this scholarship indicates, the attempt to reckon with the historicity of montage in architectural culture arrived with a considerable delay. Sigfried Giedion’s seminal books Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, bauen in Eisenbeton (Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete) (1928) and Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) mobilized montage-­like juxtaposition of illustrations—­including his own photomontages—­yet he nowhere reflected explicitly on this technique, a conspicuous gap given the significant emphasis he placed on cubist collage.20 Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) drew most of its evidence from the primary documents of the 1910s and 1920s and highlighted the influential role of futurism and Dada in shaping the idea of modern architecture, yet the text gives only passing mention to the legacy of collage and none at all to montage.21 Leonardo Benevolo’s Storia ­dell’architettura moderna (1960) was the first history of modern architecture 9 INTRODUCTION

to reproduce one of Mies’s photomontages, yet has nothing to say about their status as montages.22 It is with the work of Manfredo Tafuri in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a historical concern for montage emerges within the discipline. A concern for montage was key to Tafuri’s influential critique of the historical avant-­garde, initially advanced in his 1969 essay “Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” In it Tafuri asserted that a “law of montage” was essential to the avant-­gardes. For all the avant-­gardes—­and not just those concerned with painting—­the law of montage [legge del montaggio] is fundamental. Since the assembled objects belong to the real world, the canvas became the neutral field into which the experience of shock, suffered in the city, was projected. Indeed, the problem now became that of teaching not how one should “suffer” that shock but how one should absorb and internalize it as an inevitable condition of existence.23

The connotations of Tafuri’s “legge del montaggio,” lost in the English translation, directly linked the fragments assembled through avant-­garde montage to an apparatus of economic rationality (the catena di montaggio, or assembly line). Such a “law” was emblematic of the avant-­garde’s capacity to internalize the socioeconomic rationality of the assembly line, together with the resultant experience of shock and disintegration in the industrial metropolis. To see the avant-­garde as a mechanism for absorbing the disrupted, discontinuous, and fragmented experiences of the modern city meant understanding its role as fundamentally internal to, rather than opposed to, the processes through which capitalism advanced.24 Tafuri’s thinking about montage, like Peter Bürger’s influential contemporaneous critique of the historical avant-­garde, was closely linked to an allegory of fragmentation drawn from the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.25 ­Tafuri’s and Bürger’s critiques defined the historical avant-­gardes in contrast to the neo-­avant-­gardes of the 1950s and 1960s; consequently, their historical consciousness of montage stressed the priority of the interwar years. What troubled Tafuri about such neo-­avant-­garde groups, which for him included Archigram, Hollein, Archizoom, and Superstudio among others, was the illusion that a “desecrating immersion” into the chaos of mass consumption might ultimately lead to a command over the signs of consumerism as well as their technological infrastructures.26 Such a distortion, he argued, was fundamentally ideological, providing imaginary cover for what in reality was the 10 INTRODUCTION

discipline’s “masochistic” disintegration and dissolution into a field of forces it could in no way control. Tafuri’s critique of the avant-­garde was powerful, yet the claims about montage at the heart of this critique were polemically generalized, subsuming a range of changeable and distinct techniques, such as collage, photomontage, and filmic montage, into a totalizing theory of the avant-­garde’s role within capitalism. In recent years, different lines of analysis have emerged, as concepts of montage have continued to solicit critical, scholarly, and curatorial debate. In the work of Georges Didi-­Huberman, Philippe-­Alain Michaud, and W. J. T. Mitchell, the central touchstone has turned toward the legacy of Aby Warburg rather than that of the Frankfurt school. Such recent interpretations have hinged less on avant-­garde photomontage than on constellations of reproductions in the form of atlases, most paradigmatically the panels of Warburg’s incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–­29). Here the conceptualization of montage has been bound up with an effort to rethink the histories and practices of iconology and the afterlives of images. More than the fragmenting effects of capitalism, they have foregrounded questions concerning the histori­cal and psychic forces that impel transmission, animation, and movement.27 Since the 1990s, historians of art and architecture including Buchloh, Hal Foster, K. Michael Hays, and Branden Joseph have critiqued and extended Tafuri’s and Bürger’s interpretations of the historical and neo-­avant-­gardes, ­troubling these earlier accounts’ assumptions about authenticity and historical repe­ tition, questioning the strict emphasis on critical negation as the criteria for aesthetic judgment, and asserting other frameworks for thinking about capitalism.28 This book similarly builds on Tafuri’s critique of the neo-­avant-­ garde, without subsuming the complex history of postwar montage to a particular ideological function. It engages montage less as a “law” than as an evolving and contentious array of techniques, proceeding through a close attention to changes in the technics and discourses surrounding composite image production. Nor does it begin with the 1920s, a decade that has so often been privileged as the locus of avant-­garde montage’s historical discovery. In this sense, interwar photomontage will be understood as a new manner for practicing and conceptualizing the manipulation of photomechanical materials and techniques that were established well before 1920 and continued long after.29 The book dwells on the enduring and unstable relationship between montage and changing problems of industrial assembly in the second half of the twentieth century, as these inform composite media practices, on the one hand, and a concern for tectonic experimentation, on the other. In doing so, it concentrates on the analogical dimension central to montage, a 11 INTRODUCTION

concept that emerged by likening the assembly of two-­dimensional materials to the assembly of three-­dimensional structures and industrial machines. Such an analogy remains especially important for any account concerned with the architectural life of this technique. The changing significance of industrial assembly was key to the ongoing remediation and reconfiguration of montage techniques during the postwar decades. Such an analytic framework departs from familiar periodizations to rethink montage’s unsettled postwar persistence, setting the 1960s within a history of photomechanical design that stretches back to the late nineteenth century. As has often been noted, techniques for conjoining multiple negatives to create a single image, known as combination printing, were widely used in the nineteenth century, both for remedying the technical limitations of period equipment—­as practiced by early architectural photographers such as Edouard Baldus—­and as part of a search for specific aesthetic effects, as in the work of Henry Peach Robinson or Oscar Reijlander.30 With the growing availability of printed photographs in the second half of the nineteenth century, artists and hobbyists alike cut and pasted photographs to create single images and entire albums. In architectural culture, one of the most immediate contexts for photographic manipulation in the late nineteenth century was the growing use of site photographs in competitions and for communication with clients. Early examples include two large-­format photomontages produced by the Munich architect Friedrich von Thiersch for the renovation of Wiesbaden’s Kurhaus. A few years later, Mies van der Rohe, who may have known Thiersch’s work, constructed his earliest surviving photomontage for the Bismarck monument competition in 1910. The Belgian architect Antoine Pompe submitted an exquisitely detailed overdrawn photograph for the redesign of the Maison du Peuple in Liège in 1914 (Plate 1). Such early hybrid visuali­zations have typically been analyzed as part of a concern to endow drawing with a “greater realism,” yet this assumption might be better understood as a question and not an answer.31 By what means could such conjunctions of manual and mechanical projection seem convincing rather than strange? To begin to formulate a response, one must look more closely at these media artifacts. Thiersch inserted a new building over the existing one by layering gouache on the surface of a photographic enlargement, and then delineating the features of the proposed facade in graphite. Thiersch’s overpainting meticulously aligned itself with the perspective existing in the photograph, delicately slipping the pediment behind a repoussoir of foliage in the foreground, such that the project appears to sit within the space of the photograph rather than on its surface. Such a maneuver called for a touch 12 INTRODUCTION

that was both painterly and attuned to the syntax of photographic printing, as each speck of gouache added to the photograph destroyed its granular pattern. Up close, photographic realism appears as a media operation that destroyed the texture of the photographic signal only to restore it with painstaking care. Compared to Mies’s Weimar photomontages, most famously for a glass skyscraper on Friedrichstrasse (circa 1922), these early overdrawn photographs are typically seen as belonging not only to a different period but a different conceptual universe: the naturalism and late historicism of the former at odds with the stark, avant-­garde formalism of the latter. The former were individual boards exhibited to politicians or juries. The latter, while notionally a competition entry, was never submitted; rather, it was conceived for the pages of magazines and for display in exhibitions.32 While one does not see a shift as radical as Mies’s exposed “skin and bones” construction in these early overdrawn photographs, should one accept that Mies’s Weimar montages remain essentially different from those of Thiersch or Pompe? Seen together, such early photomechanical composites highlight montage as a problem of articulating the visible relationships between different kinds

FIGURE I.4. Friedrich

von Thiersch, perspective of the Wiesbaden Kurhaus, December 1902. Gouache and graphite on silver gelatin print. Photographer unknown. Copyright Architekturmuseum der TU München.

13 INTRODUCTION

of media. In this sense the early works of Thiersch, Pompe, and Mies may be seen less as efforts to fuse drawing and photography than as efforts to work on the differences between media and to make these signify in particu­ lar ways. In them we see architects attending to the materiality and noise of photo­mechanical transmission; they are projections of stability founded in disturbance. Whereas Thiersch dissimulated the disturbance his brushstrokes created, Mies’s postwar images frankly highlighted the tension between the texture of drawing materials and the grain of silver gelatin in an enlarged photographic print. Whereas Thiersch’s expansion of Wiesbaden’s Kurhaus implied a continuity with the existing building, Mies’s skyscraper aimed to radically shift this typology, exposing the industrial nature of its structure and emphatically marking its distinctness from the surrounding urban context. The changed perception of steel and glass depended on the qualities of the image through which Mies materialized his concept. Seizing the noise of media for architecture, his montage articulated an order in which a conflict between different kinds of graphic particles could be read as a signal emerging from formlessness: an invitation to see this optical disturbance as the play of “light reflections” on offset panes of glass.33 The familiar periodization that has separated these prewar and postwar works has prevented a recognition of the larger media transition to which they testify. The montages of the 1960s, not unlike those of the interwar years, were conceived for exhibitions, competitions, and the pages of magazines; yet they were also distinct in a number of ways. These differences include a changed sense of historical consciousness, a different technical landscape for prefabricated construction, and the growing accessibility of small-­scale photo­mechanical reproduction. The prevalent metropolitan iconography of the inter­war years no longer dominates the montage practice of the 1960s. Rather than the soaring verticality of skyscrapers, high-­angle views of vast crowds, or the collision of plunging urban vistas, figurations of horizontality are more common: sprawling framework structures, imaginary landscapes, or grid surfaces receding to distant horizons. Such a horizontal imaginary can be seen to mark a shift in emphasis from the urban metropolis as visual problem to the challenge of envisioning relationships increasingly coordinated through transnational and global networks. Horizontality was also connected to a concern for dehierarchized and indeterminate arrangements, as much of physical structures as of knowledge, echoing a more labile movement of information, concepts, and technologies between fields. Banham succinctly captured a key aspect of this changing idea of assembly in his account of London’s “underground architectural protest magazines.” Writing of Archigram 14 INTRODUCTION

and Clip-­Kit, he argued that their “charisma” lay in assembling “intellectual or physical structures” from “ideas, images, documents, and concepts raided from other disciplines.”34 Banham highlights a shift in conceptualizing assembly with important consequences for thinking about montage during the 1960s; the analogies surrounding graphic assembly were no longer bound to a world of industrial connections but came to emphasize the manner in which architects imagined appropriating intellectual elements from domains that lay outside their field. However brief, Banham’s remarks about assembly suggest how the period’s montages might productively be read in terms of the changing relations between design and building during these years. The progressive separation of disegno—­as an act of mental conception encoded in two-­dimensional drawing—­from the physical execution of a building has long been recognized as crucial to the emergence of architecture as a liberal art.35 Such a separation informed the professional ideal of the architect, yet it has also marked a historically contingent and shifting gap that architectural culture has been concerned to master. As I show in chapter 1, Banham’s comments emerged in the context of a British architectural culture where such a separation was anything but secure. In the 1950s and 1960s, Britain, as elsewhere in Europe during these years, witnessed an intensified

FIGURE I.5. Friedrich

von Thiersch, detail from alternate perspective of Wiesbaden Kurhaus (1902–­7 ), December 1902. Gouache and graphite on silver gelatin print. Copyright Architekturmuseum TU München.

15 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.6. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, entry for the Ideas Competition, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper (Honeycomb), photograph of lost photomontage, 1922. Silver gelatin print, 60⅜ × 46⅝ inches. Bauhaus-­Archiv, Berlin. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst Bonn.

industrialization of building parts and their means of assembly. Architects were acutely conscious of working with an ever greater number of parts that they played no role in designing, an awareness that raised significant questions about the nature of the discipline’s intellectual work. The control that design could exert over construction encountered its limits in the growing 16 INTRODUCTION

influence of the building industry. In such a condition, problems of assembly could no longer be understood as they traditionally had: as a part of building, secondary to and separate from design. Consequently, the discourse around assembly, and the means for visualizing it, shifted. Valorized in ways that no longer depended on the shaping of joints and material connections, the design of assembly was reclaimed as a facet of intellectual work more generally. To valorize design in terms of the selection and assembly of ready-­made elements and concepts borrowed from different fields troubled the image of the architect as master form-­giver. Such a conception was rooted in notions of Gestaltung—­a notoriously untranslatable term alternately rendered as design, formation, or form-­creation—­influentially disseminated by the German Werkbund and the Bauhaus yet rooted in nineteenth-­century organicist thought.36 Such discourses had embraced industrial prefabrication in order to reform and reshape these processes, beginning with their elementary mate­rials and units. Endowed with new forms, the assembly of parts was to yield a correspondingly new and different kind of whole, one guided not by inherited conventions of beauty but by a type of purposive unity akin to that of living organisms. Banham’s emphasis on clever borrowing and reassembly, by contrast, was reminiscent of contemporaneous discourses on technological transfer.37 Such thinking about assembly was equally distinct from another theoretical legacy of the nineteenth century: discourses of composition. The theory of elemental composition, a key legacy of the Beaux-­ Arts educational system, codified by Julien Guadet’s Éléments et théorie de ­l’architecture (1903), sought to create unity from a strictly disciplined combination of small architectural components, such as doors, windows, columns, and walls, into rooms, vaults, vestibules, stairs, and porches. These larger “compositional ele­ments” were further assembled according to principles of proportion, harmony, symmetry, and hierarchy.38 For Banham, it was precisely the lingering cultural authority embedded in theories of composition that experimental forms of technological assembly might overcome in what he dubbed the “second machine age.” As much, if not more than, depictions of space, practices of montage during these years reveal much about the things architects imagined they might appropriate from domains that lay outside their field. The legacy of montage loaned itself to such changeable combinations of appropriated technologies, images, and concepts, and was in turn changed by them. The inventive raiding of elements from radically different domains depended on access to information via printed matter and film, together with the ability to extract, edit, reassemble, and reproduce this information. The architecture of 17 INTRODUCTION

cranes, frames, clips, balloons, and screens that galvanized the imaginations of an emerging generation of architects might be recognized as the graphic avatars of the lifting, copying, cutting, enlarging, masking, and overlaying through which pages were assembled. The displacement of assembly from physical procedure to graphic operation was caught amid the contradictory pressures of period—­on the one hand, an intensified industrialization of the building industry, and on the other, an awareness of the increasing centrality of knowledge and information to the creation of value. In this sense, the endurance and remediation of montage techniques might be thought in relation to the notions of a “post-­industrial” society theorized by Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell during these years.39 Processes of selection, transfer, and recombination came to matter as much, if not more, than creative shaping. Such transfers were not secondary means of exchange, duplication, or dissemination but primary aspects of production. Innovation did not precede transfer processes but emerged out of them, in the manner of conjoining things already formed. One can identify three general modes that recur across the montages brought together in this book. The first emphasized forms of additive assembly and concerned less the identity of discrete fragments than the configurative principles linking flexible, variable, and interchangeable parts. The physi­cal connection of multiple elements of different origins often appeared in the guise of different structural principles or figures, yet the particular combinations were often understood as the expressions of the agency of imagined users, rather than a reflection of the architect’s intention. Alongside such additive assemblies, one also finds a widespread interest in displacement and disassembly. With displacement, the central interest lay in the effects of isolating and transposing a given element, whereas with disassembly the stress lay on the elimination of parts. Here the dismantling of conventions and the undermining of figurative stability often resulted in atom­ized and dehierarchized field-­like arrangements. A third mode pertains to the sequencing of images and patterns, techniques particularly evident in architects’ use of film and projected media. Techniques of rapid cutting and multiple-­screen display popularized by Charles Eames and Ray Eames’s films recur frequently.40 In contrast to Sergei Eisenstein’s interwar models of montage, which emphasized the production of new meanings by orchestrating conflicts within a sequence of shots, these postwar forms of montage appealed to a viewer’s supposedly innate capacity to form relationships across multiple screens and channels, implying that spectatorship itself be understood as an open-­ended cognitive capacity for reassembly.41 In each case, open-­ended addition, disas18 INTRODUCTION

sembly, and multichannel flow were valorized over and against the transcendental certainties of composition or the demiurgic creativity of the form-­giver. It was through such techniques that architects addressed the enduring gap separating design and building while never quite filling it.

Envisioning The effort to understand montage as a set of conceptual techniques for envisioning assembly does not imply that montage will be understood as an instrument or method, nor does it imply a technologically determinist argument.42 The present volume’s emphasis on technique draws on research into Kulturtechniken—­cultural techniques or cultural technologies—­developed in German media theory in recent years.43 Research into cultural techniques seeks to grasp how cultural distinctions are articulated out of technical a ­priori practices and operations that link culture to technics at a primary level. As Bernhard Siegert, a leading theorist of this approach, has argued, cultural techniques entail a model of communication in which “the fundamental relationship is not between sender and receiver, but between communication and noise. . . . Media are now conceptualized as code-­generating interfaces between the real and cultural orders.”44 Such an emphasis also marks out the book’s difference with respect to the rich vein of historical work on architectural photography.45 Stressing a broader field of photomechanical techniques, rather than strictly photographic objects and genres, it takes seriously the fact that the architects considered here rarely took the photographs or shot the film that they collected and manipulated. Rather, they cut, reassembled, combined, sequenced, scaled, traced, drew, annotated, and retransmitted these materials. Despite the centrality of such procedures, they have been overlooked in accounts of architectural photography. To better account for them, the book draws on the conception of “envisioning” proposed by the philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser. Photography, Flusser has argued, should be understood within the larger category of the technical image, in which he also includes film, television broadcasts, videos, and animations.46 What such images have in common is that at a technological level they are mosaics of visual particles organized into automated patterns. Writing in the early 1980s, before the advent of digital photography, Flusser stressed the reactions between photons and chemical or electronic particles that made up a photographic image, something that no hand could grasp and no human eye could see unassisted. We may look at photographic, filmic, or televisual surfaces and see images 19 INTRODUCTION

of bricks, wires, lamps, signs, glass, or human beings, but this only holds by keeping the technical image at a distance. Up close, these referents break down into the noise of mediation, patterns produced through technical processes. The emergence of such a “universe of technical images,” he argued, radically supplanted manual depiction stemming from visual observation. Originating neither in the mind nor with the hand, envisioning results from the remote control of automated processes, the pressing of keys and buttons to manipulate an extensive technical apparatus—­which includes chemistry, optics, mechanics, and electronics in the form of cameras, lenses, darkrooms, printing machines, transmission networks, and computer software. To envision, for Flusser, is to endow the particulate matrices of dots, points, lines, or tones that allow for the transmission of technical information with forms of visual and figurative concreteness. Acts of envisioning, he argued, should be judged by the degree to which they conform to and extend the routinized auto­mation characteristic of an apparatus or succeed in turning the apparatus “against its own condition of being automatic.”47 Montages articulate distinctions that are similarly poised between the abstract automation of patterns and the capacity to concretely reassemble abstractions in ways that alter and challenge their workings. The composite visualizations that we call montages depended on the pressing of buttons and keys to fix abstract particles into concrete technical images, yet they reassemble and manipulate particles in ways that have never been reducible to such automation, a material history that productively troubles aspects of Flusser’s essay. The emergence of photography in the 1830s did not constitute an absolute rupture with earlier techniques of visualization; in many ways it continued to depend on artisanal practices associated with earlier techniques.48 The entanglement of photographic automation with forms of manual intervention was especially marked in the long struggle to transmit photographic information to mass audiences by means of the printed page. Nearly a half century elapsed between the invention of the daguerreotype and the successful implementation of techniques that allowed photographs to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines without the use of woodcuts or etchings manually created from photographs by graphic artists.49 The crucial breakthrough was the halftone process. Patented in the 1880s, the halftone used a screen of variable density to mirror and transmit a photograph’s tonal information onto the surface of blocks used in relief printing. While pages have long possessed intermedial qualities, the halftone enabled a new photo­mechanical intermediality, enabling relationships between photographs, texts, and other types of graphic information, such as charts, draw20 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.7. Satirical

postcard of the Pont Transbordeur, Marseille, undated.

ings, and diagrams, to become widely available. Not insignificantly, it was in the wake of the halftone process that an early wave of photomontage erupted in advertising, turn-­of-­the-­century magazines, and satirical postcards.50 A search for finer texture and fidelity brought about the rival intaglio process of industrial rotogravure in the 1920s, a technique that offered subtler tonal gradations and the possibility for more visually seamless transitions. The production of illustrated graphic layouts using halftones with industrial relief printing relied on a complex division of labor—­a layout would be speci­ fied by a designer; the selected photographs would be copied, prepared, and etched by a team of process engravers; and the resulting image plate would then be composited, or “made-­up” with blocks of type set by typesetters, to form a page that was printed by still another group.51 Rotogravure, by contrast, allowed text, titles, and photographs to be composed on cellophane sheets mounted on light tables, which were photomechanically transferred to form printing plates.52 The graphic designer or artist worked directly with a layout technician to combine, juxtapose, and retouch photographic transparencies and texts on this transparent surface. With relief-­printed halftones, editing and design remained separate from print preparation, restricting the ability for this intermediality to transform the page’s structure. With rotogravure this division was unmade. The result was a new kind of technical image in which photomechanical construction, rather than typographical traditions, could play a dominant role.53 Not insignificantly, rotogravure was the technical means through which the best-­known photomontages of the 1930s were 21 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.8. “Bildmontage,” image assembly using cellophane on light tables for rotogravure reproduction. From Alexander Braun, Der Tiefdruck, 1952. FIGURE I.9. “The Strain on Mankind Is Shrinking,”

page layout, VU magazine, March 1933. Collection of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

22 INTRODUCTION

assembled and reproduced for a mass public, including John Heartfield’s canoni­cal work for Berlin’s Arbeiter-­Illustrierte-­Zeitung (1924–­38), El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko’s layouts for USSR in Construction (1931–­40), and Alexander Liberman and Marcel Ichac’s spreads for the French weekly VU (1928–­40).54 Rotogravure remained an expensive industrial process, only feasible for magazines with large capital investment or high circulation figures. It was only in the postwar years with the broader dissemination of photo-­offset lithography, because of the introduction of compact automated presses, that architects acquired a comparable level of direct involvement in the assembly of the page. The perfection of lightweight photosensitive plates for use on rotary

offset lithographic presses allowed printers to make their plates by photomechanically capturing page layouts delivered in pasteup form. A younger generation of architects began to exploit the opportunities of such compact presses in the early 1960s, no longer working on cellophane at lightboxes, but combining text, clippings, photographs, drawings, screen-­tone, and ink on basic cardstock at drawing boards or at kitchen tables. The resulting pages, no longer bound to older procedures of book or magazine production, were run off alongside the disposable communications emerging from such presses: supermarket flyers, newsletters, concert handbills, and underground newspapers. Seeing the montages of the 1960s as a new kind of technical image testifies to an enduring entanglement of chemistry, lenses, and automated machines with pencils, scissors, brushes, and adhesives. Whereas Flusser argued that the instruments of drawing were supplanted by technical imaging, the long history of photomontage enables one to examine how the habits and conventions of drawing came to absorb, and were transformed by, qualities characteristic of photographic framing, contrast, and transmission. The manner in which architects envisioned distinctions between inside and outside, proximity and distance, light and dark, continuous and fragmented was neither prior to nor outside this hybrid cultural-­technical condition but within it. From this perspective, recovering the role of montage during the 1960s marks a turning point in a longer story, one that is not simply a prehistory of today’s digital processes.

“Electronics and the Changing Role of Print” At the outset of the 1960s Marshall McLuhan published a short paper, “Electronics and the Changing Role of Print.”55 An early manifestation of insights that became famous in his best-­selling book Understanding Media (1964), the article advanced his well-­known argument that media were extensions of our sensory organs, actively shaping and determining the things they transmitted. While McLuhan had initially made a name for himself in the 1950s analyzing magazine advertisements, by the early 1960s his arguments emphasized an epochal rupture separating electronic media such as television from printed media such as books and newspapers. Electronic media, he maintained, produced fundamentally “new patterns of perception and sensibility,” degrading the primacy of vision and its associated sense of distance, giving rise to intensified forms of multisensory involvement.56 Less familiar was McLuhan’s observation that the paradoxical result of the waning of print culture would 23 INTRODUCTION

be the production of more, rather than less, printing than before. The growing dominance of electronic media during the 1960s decentered and devalued printing, yet it also splintered and transformed it, allowing it to take on new roles and be appropriated in new ways. When one of the period’s most tireless writers, Archigram’s Peter Cook, began to historicize work produced by the protagonists studied here, he placed special emphasis on the catalyzing role of such print networks.57 Cook described the experimental architecture of the 1960s as a “truly international underground” akin to the period’s contemporaneous underground press syndicate—­a network of publishers similarly fueled by access to relatively cheap photo-­offset lithography.58 In stressing experimental, rather than neo-­avant-­garde, Cook seized on a term that had been mobilized at the Bauhaus and elsewhere in the interwar years. Yet he invoked it less as a form of quasi-­scientific testing in the service of pedagogy or of mass production than as a heuristic attitude immanent to a networked form of sociability. Rather than an effort to recover the heroic struggle of interwar groups bound together by an explicit cultural or political program, Cook saw experimental architecture as bound by a disidentification with the forms, constraints, and mythologies of late modern architecture: to experiment, he noted, was “to experiment out of architecture.”59 If the experimental sensibility was antiheroic, it was also anti-­individual, a mode of expression that emerged from a network of “small groups of people in which the individual identity of personal talent is no longer heroically clear.”60 A description such as Cook’s cannot be assumed uncritically. However much he identified with the underground press’s humor, network-­thinking, and rejection of dominant culture, Archigram did not venture into the explicit militancy, sexuality, or drug culture characteristic of such publications. Yet such an account highlights how technical shifts in the making of print were associated with a consciousness of historical difference, one expressed in terms of a changed manner of thinking about subjectivity, group formation, and authorship. The paradoxical devaluation, expansion, and redefinition of printing’s role amid the rise of electronic technologies, most centrally the accessibility of compact automated offset lithographic presses, was key to the formation of experimental architecture as a self-­image for a different kind of group work. The drafting boards on which the period’s pasteups were assembled were increasingly surrounded by other electronic devices including miniature tape recorders, portable televisions, film cameras, carousel slide projectors, and video recorders. Here, too, techniques of montage played an important role. The problem of structuring sequences of moving images and of configuring 24 INTRODUCTION

multimedia projection environments came to transform the perception of still photography, drawing, and modeling. Through such an expanded set of devices, architects looked to grasp the architectural and urban implications of emerging global telecommunications networks. McLuhan had influentially described the increasing acceleration and decentralization of electronic telecommunication in explicitly spatial terms, as a condition in which distance was collapsed and recombined into a new mosaic-­like form of instantaneous awareness.61 This new sense of electronic space did not so much eliminate the page as transform it. On the one hand, the page appeared as a site of implosion, a datum where anything and everything might be made to appear. Yet, just as the page was connected to diverse media forms, it also came to be understood as part of a three-­dimensional environment. It was in this unstable zone that the constructive analogy central to montage was posed once again. The montages studied in this volume depended on an array of materials and technologies that included tear sheets, storyboards, notebooks, drawings, filing devices, cameras, projectors, printing presses, wiring diagrams, and electronic switches. The syncretic quality of montage techniques in architectural culture offer an opportunity to explore an intermedial rather than medium-­specific approach to montage. Echoing McLuhan’s claim that

FIGURE I.10. Compact automated offset lithographic presses and associated equipment, early 1960s. From L. E. Lawson, Offset Lithography, 1963.

25 INTRODUCTION

the content of one medium is always another medium, montage during these years plugged forms of drawing, writing, and photography into the reproducible formats of photo-­offset lithography and film. Montage procedures might be thought of in terms of intermedial articulation, a process in which architectural distinctions come to be articulated photomechanically, and in which photomechanical qualities are distinguished architecturally. Even when they were made to appear seamless, montage techniques remained a site of tension, as architects struggled to reconcile an imploded and flattened range of electro-­graphic procedures with various traditions of construction. While some embraced this expanded, intermedial condition as an opportunity to extend the discipline’s thinking and operations, others, suspicious of the challenge represented by the increasing sophistication of programming and projection technologies, remained wary of the threat they posed to the architect’s authority in defining space. The book offers a selective framework rather than a comprehensive inventory. It compares key works produced by groups active in London, Vienna, Paris, and Florence from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, highlighting the formal, historical, and ideological differences that this shared repertoire of techniques bring to light. The first chapter examines the formation of Reyner Banham’s theory of “clip-­on” architecture in the early 1960s, a signal articulation of the changing attitude to assembly mentioned above. Clip-­on architecture can be seen not in isolation but as part of a larger effort to rethink the architect’s role amid the industrialization of assembly, a problem taken up by Banham’s former Independent Group colleagues Theo Crosby and John McHale. Both helped reconceptualize the significance of assembly in ways closely linked to practices of clipping printed media. Banham’s clip-­on architecture, a theory of architecture premised on the indeterminate and impermanent attachment of technologies selected from different domains, was informed by the recodification of collage and montage practices by members of London’s Independent Group during the 1950s, as much as it was by changes in industrial production.62 Clip-­on architecture promised forms of unity without wholeness, embracing promiscuous, horizontal, and expendable forms of reassembly that integrated elements of graphic communication with ready-­made industrial construction systems. Such a turn was not without ambivalence. The price of this expansive, flexible assemblage was the loss of an older utopian aspiration that had sought a total integration of design and building. The thinking of Banham, Crosby, and McHale was an important hinge, connected to, yet separate from, the groups whose work takes center stage in 26 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.11. Warren Chalk and Ron Herron, pasteup for Archigram 4, “Zoom” issue, 1964. Copyright Archigram.

the rest of the book. As influential voices in the early 1960s, they supported the emergence of an architect like Cedric Price and of groups such as Clip-­Kit and Archigram. The second chapter revisits Archigram’s plug-­in concept to pull it apart from Banham’s earlier clip-­on formulation (a difference largely dismissed in Banham’s own account). The plug-­in concept provides a vivid instance of how an older constructive analogy was adapted to the emerging 27 INTRODUCTION

logic of electronic technologies. While it has largely been remembered in terms of the group’s drawings for megastructures, the plug-­in concept should also be seen in terms of Archigram’s effort to conceptualize its drawings and publications as part of an expanded electronic communication network. This conceptual turn was forged around an intimate if unstable link between printed pages and projection screens. A central thrust of Archigram’s work through the 1960s was the effort to envision an increasingly elaborate screen architecture, in drawings and publications as much as in competition entries, exhibitions, and multimedia environments. Archigram’s screen architecture was defined by a capacity to appear and disappear in time, structuring an array of ephemeral experiences through a mobile environmental assembly of media that included cameras, projectors, slides, films, robots, trusses, tape recorders, televisions, switches, and computers. The concern for an emerging array of environmental, audiovisual media was also important to the thinking of Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, whose drawings Archigram had cut and glued into its pasteups, and who in turn became aware of the British group’s work. Chapter 3 examines Hollein and Pichler’s manner of engaging photomechanical and electronic media, part of a larger shift in their work from sculptural and architectural referents to a preoccupation with displacement, juxtaposition, and sequencing. Reassembling images collected from popular illustrated magazines, the alternative press, and scientific journals, Hollein and Pichler vigorously rejected the functionalism that had dominated architectural culture in Austria during postwar reconstruction. Hollein insisted not only that architecture communicate but that architecture be understood as a communication medium in the broadest sense. Such a project informed the tiny, capsule-­like interiors he realized in Vienna in the mid-­1960s as much as it did the magazine Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, which he coedited at the time. His notorious 1968 manifesto “Alles ist Architektur” (“Everything Is Architecture”) used techniques of montage to formulate an utterly connective concept of architecture, a practice extended across a vast field of objects and references. “Everything Is Architecture” provides a vivid instance of the imploded page, a sensibility closely bound up with the spatial implosion that McLuhan used to describe the emergence of transcontinental satellite transmissions at this moment. Such an attitude equally informed Hollein’s Media Lines, an “urban conditioning system” realized for the 1972 Olympic Village in Munich, in which signage, audio, video, lighting, screens, shelter, and heating and cooling systems combined to form a linear media assemblage. The signals relayed from London and Vienna through the first half of the 28 INTRODUCTION

decade were received with a combination of fascination and skepticism in Paris during the mid-­1960s. Chapter 4 considers the work of the Utopie group, which included architects, urban planners, and sociologists whose collaborations emerged partly out of the École des Beaux-­Arts and partly from the intellectual orbit of the philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In the group’s designs for pneumatic structures, its eponymous journal, and in the exhibition Structures Gonflables (1968), the combinatorial logic implicit in open-­ended systems of parts was theorized through a rhetoric of démontage (disassembly or dismantling). The group’s experiments in demountable pneumatic construction, drawn from a rich strain of lightweight building associated with the work of Jean Prouvé, Edouard Albert, and David-­Georges Emmerich, remained in productive tension with a structuralist critique of ideology. The hope that ideological signification might be arrested through disassembly was advanced through dense and satirical montages published in the pages of its eponymous magazine, in pamphlets, and in articles for the larger press. Amid the occupation of the École des Beaux-­Arts during the events of May–­June 1968, Utopie sought to hold together a practical engagement with physically demountable things and an effort to destabilize architectural culture through ideological critique, a collaborative intellectual project marked as much by the theoretical turbulence of French intellectual life as it was by the efforts by the administration of Charles de Gaulle to reshape the future of Paris. As in Paris, the Faculty of Architecture in Florence saw significant conflicts between 1963 and 1968, an agonistic condition in which students developed new practices for altering the curriculum. Along with occupations and strikes, they insisted on working in collaborative groups, on using found and ready-­made objects in models, and on introducing films and projections in their thesis projects. The final chapter turns to the iconic photomontages and films of Superstudio by revisiting both the pedagogical context in which the group crystallized and its connection to the international printed network examined in the previous chapters. The group’s earliest work engaged electronic audiovisual media through the design of “participatory spaces,” immersive, multimedia interiors modeled on so-­called Piper clubs, a hybrid of discothèque, exhibition, and performance venue that emerged in the second half of the 1960s in Italy. In the wake of 1968, however, the group’s engagement with media shifted to tactics in which photomontages, texts, storyboards, and films were the key vehicle. Circulated through magazines, posters, exhibitions, and lectures, the group articulated counterscenarios by reassembling materials extracted from architecture, cinema, popular magazines, advertisements, and science journals. Montage was central to the plotting 29 INTRODUCTION

of such counterscenarios, whose combination of visual vividness and disjointed temporality renarrated central terms in architectural culture—­such as monument, surface, and information. Their strategies for exacerbating key narratives within the discipline set an influential precedent to which the next generation of architects paid close attention. Graphic Assembly builds on a body of work that has, over the last three decades, made questions of media increasingly central to histories of modern architecture. Beatriz Colomina’s groundbreaking research into magazines, photographs, and exhibitions has reinterpreted these not solely as a means for reproducing drawings and buildings but as the very site where architecture’s modernity was produced.63 Anthony Vidler and Giuliana Bruno have similarly illuminated the constitutive exchanges between architecture and cinema as indispensable to the formation of key spatial conceptions of the modern movement.64 The work of Robert Elwall and Claire Zimmerman has opened up new perspectives for rethinking architecture’s absorption of photographic media during the twentieth century.65 In very different ways, Rein­hold Martin and Felicity D. Scott have engaged the rise of television, video, and computer networks in the postwar period and theorized a different set of political problematics for understanding architecture’s status as media.66 As media have become more central to architectural history, the conversations about them have tended to shift. No longer delimited as “mass media,” media have come to designate a broad range of mediating entities, from maps, grids, and printing presses to telephone networks, computer circuits, and automated doors. The sheer scope of such a broad redefinition represents a challenge yet also an opportunity to advance new questions about architecture’s crucial role in articulating and managing spatial and cultural distinctions out of a range of technical systems. Reconsidering the media techniques of montage in postwar experimental architecture may help to think about the changing definition of intellectual work and authorship in architectural culture during this period. The discipline has long insisted on design as an immaterial, informational, and conceptual authority distinct from the material craft of building, yet such authority has always been mediated by manual techniques, from privileged acts such as drawing and modeling to more routine and “uncreative” doings such as cutting, notating, filing, stamping, and gluing. In the making of pasteups, the creative and the routine cannot be easily separated. In them one encounters a field that cannot be defined strictly in terms of authorship but in terms of operations through which a larger, historically contingent assemblage organizing the relationship between hands, eyes, paper, screens, and particles 30 INTRODUCTION

can be perceived. The epi­sodes studied here might be seen as moments of thickening, sedimentation, and transformation, in which formerly separate technical mediations came to coexist as part of a single, and more accessible, photomechanical process.67 As the sociotechnical systems that govern the formation and circulation of technical images exert more power over human perception and action, the role of such concrete manipulations deserves rethinking. It is precisely by reconsidering the relationship of hand, eye, and machine, as mediated by the banal and largely invisible cultural technology of the pasteup, that one can find conflicts surrounding questions of industrial and graphic assembly enacted in architectural culture during the 1960s. In such a domain handling mattered, but in a different way. No longer an inher­ ently or essentially human agency, it can be seen as a form of human and technical touch, a capacity for envisioning assembly, reassembly, and disassembly constituted by and within forms of technical processing. Accounting for the historicity of such handling sets the narrative of montage into a different frame of reference. It seeks to complicate teleological narratives that stress ideological instrumentalization, on the one hand, while it also looks to avoid the simplistic dichotomy that pits drawing as an authentic embodied practice against the threatening auto­mation of hands and eyes, on the other. Seeing the montages of the long 1960s as facets of a larger media practice aims to open up different ways of thinking the historical temporality of visuali­zation. Rather than invention followed by repetition, or negation followed by opera­ tionalization, it sets montage within a temporal perspective structured by persistence across ruptures, part of an unfinished problematic that unfolds symptomatically around questions of assembly. As the discipline’s technical images grow ever more opaque and complex, an untimely historical understanding of these dynamics provides a robust way to think through the enduring power of such composite visual assemblages and their political roles.

31 INTRODUCTION

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1

CLIPPING The Promiscuous Attachments of Reyner Banham

As objects of intellectual stimulation, the cubist paintings and collages of the period 1908–­13 are cordially recommended to architects—­particularly the collages. They are, after all, the first pre-­fabricated artworks of the century. —­Anonymous, “Mis-­Lit Braques,” Architects’ Journal

“Kit” is the emotive collective noun for Goodies (which are usually ideas, images, forms, documents, concepts raided from other disciplines) and “clip” is how you put them together to make intellectual or physical structures. —­Reyner Banham, “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture”

In 1965 the historian and critic Reyner Banham weighed in on what he saw as the most radical shift in architectural design to have emerged since 1950. As he often did in his criticism, Banham seized on developments that were coming to a head by giving them a name and a history. In this case, he took up Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s highly anticipated Fun Palace project (circa 1964) and Archigram’s Plug-­In City study (1964), designating both as emblematic of an emerging ethos dubbed “clip-­on architecture.” In a special issue of Design Quarterly emblazoned with a cropped version of Ron Herron’s Walking City photomontage, Banham summarized the clip-­on concept: “an architecture of indeterminate form assembled from expendable components.”1 At the core of clip-­on architecture was a distinctly polymorphous idea of assembly. A concept averse to any stable idea of form just as it rejected durably fused connections and joints, clip-­on architecture envisioned kits of interchangeable industrial parts whose attachments were ­indeterminate, 33

impermanent, and reversible. Banham theorized an architecture responsive to the period’s technological changes, yet such a theory would not have been possible without a different conception of the image. Such a conception was profoundly shaped by practices of collage and montage elaborated in and around London’s Independent Group (IG) a decade earlier. Banham convened the first set of this group’s meetings in 1952–­53, a moment in which he first developed a notion of “image,” a theory that stood between the “bloody-­ minded” New Brutalism associated with architects like Alison and Peter Smithson, and the collages and photomontages of Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, and Eduardo Paolozzi. While Banham’s clip-­on architecture was indebted to aspects of both New Brutalism and nascent British pop art, it did not quite fit either of these rubrics. Clip-­on architecture retained the preoccupation with unformed images characteristic of the New Brutalism, yet it discarded the emphasis on raw materiality. Clip-­on architecture emphasized mass production, surface appeal, and expendable synthetic materials, yet the attention to fabrication and mechanical attachment were significantly different from Banham’s notion of “pop” architecture.2 Banham’s theory served as a hinge point between the debates and practices that emerged in the IG milieu in the 1950s and those that followed them in the 1960s, and which take center stage in the rest of this book. Neither a self-­defined movement nor an explicit set of principles, clip-­on architecture articulated a changed attitude to assembly that Banham saw manifested in buildings, pasteups, prototypes, drawings, writings, and exhibitions. The two epigraphs that began this chapter, separated by a decade, are indicative of the shift Banham sought to name and analyze. The former looked back to cubist collage as a model for combining prefabricated materials; the latter looked to clipping as a way to collect and recombine “ideas, images, forms, documents, [and] concepts” into a radically different kind of structure. The general features of Banham’s clip-­on concept have been recounted several times, yet the key points are worth revisiting.3 The concept began to emerge in the first years of the 1950s, in efforts by architects such as Gerhard Kallmann and Richard Llewellyn-­Davies to theorize an aesthetics of “endlessness” associated with the profoundly expanded capacities of industrialized manufacturing and assembly. Endlessness was taken to mark the waning of notions of center and centrality, which had long been essential to classical conceptions of order.4 Llewellyn-­Davies saw a new kind of endless order in Mies van der Rohe’s use of steel-­frame construction at Alumni Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Alumni Hall visually subordinated its parts to the whole, yet did so in a man34 CLIPPING

ner that emphasized the serial repetition of identical, linear, industrially fabricated steel beams, rather than the subdivision of a geometric figure. Epitomized by the virtual incompleteness of the building’s open corners, endlessness implied an aesthetics appropriate to buildings that could be “cut to length as required, and be neither better nor worse aesthetically for being ten units long or a thousand.”5 Banham saw a different type of endlessness in the next generation’s experiments with prefabrication, such as the Smithsons’ House of the Future (1956), or the prefabricated cabins and dwelling units designed by Ionel Schein, René Coulon, and Jacques Baudon. Such designs were neither modeled on linear steel members nor identically repeated. Based on methods of interchangeable prefabrication developed for automobile design in the 1950s, rather than an infinite repetition of the same, endlessness could be seen as an unlimited capacity to interchange and recombine parts across different yet closely related objects. Two other important factors were required for such notions of endlessness to become clip-­on architecture. The first was the interest in what Banham called “aformal” order.6 Visual aformality had drawn much from the visual arts of the immediate postwar years, from the “all-­over” composition of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to the rough shuttered concrete of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, to the brutalist “images” of Paolozzi or Henderson. The second was an interest in loose, unfixed interactions between infrastructure and architecture, for which the outboard motor served as the central analogy. For Banham, such a technical object promised that a “small concentrated package of machinery [could] convert an undifferentiated structure into something having function and purpose.”7 The two issues came together when several clip-­on units were to be combined, entailing both the problem of visual grouping and the design of an infrastructure of services, communication lines, and other technical conduits. It was this problem, he argued, that had driven Archigram’s Plug-­In City study, which Banham saw

FIGURE 1.1. Cover of “A

Clip-­On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1965), with cropped reproduction of Ron Herron’s Walking City photomontage.

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as emblematic of the clip-­on concept. Here, Banham explained, “the generalized structure becomes the source of power, service, and support, and the specialized clip-­ons become the habitable units. The outboard analogy has to be replaced by something more like the connection of domestic appliances to the house’s electrical supply.”8 The clip-­on concept reworked two key preoccupations from Banham’s writings of the 1950s. The first was his interest in the historical asynchrony and friction between technological developments and aesthetic principles, a tension central to his revisionist critique of the modern movement in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960).9 The second was Banham’s interest in image and imageability central to his account of the New Brutalism. Clip-­on architecture reoriented the problem of aformal images, shifting from the visual indeterminacy of raw materials to the indeterminate assembly of building components. A central ambivalence of Banham’s theory resides in the term he selected. Clipping was not only a term for industrialized combination and attachment but also, as his remarks on the journal Clip-­Kit highlight, a term for cutting, reassembling, and collecting printed paper. A term meant to signify connection and fastening also pointed to removal and disconnection. This latent valence of clipping, while not theorized by Banham, is essential to retrieve in order to reinterpret how processes of collage and montage shaped an alternative ethos of assembly at this moment. The latent ambivalence of “clip” was most palpable in the article’s conclusion, devoted to Archigram’s Plug-­In City drawings (Plate 2). “Archigram’s kit of interchangeable living cells and support-­structures,” Banham wrote, “seems to be the first effective image of the architecture of technology since Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes captivated the world fifteen years ago.”10 The stock he placed in the group’s emphasis on “image” stemmed from its capacity to counter the tendency among engineers and programmers to skirt the question of how such advanced technological systems were to appear. Or, as Banham, put it: “One of the most frustrating things to the arty old Adam in most of us is that the wonders of technology have a habit of going invisible on us.”11 He continued: It is no use cyberneticists and Organization-­and-­Research men telling us that a computerized city might look like anything or nothing: most of us want it to look like something. . . . A lot of technicians are going to pooh-­pooh Plug-­In City’s technological improbabilities . . . and in the process the formal lessons of the Plug-­In City might be missed. Put as tersely as possible, those lessons say this: a Plug-­In 36 CLIPPING

City must look like a Plug-­In City. If people are to enjoy manipulating this kind of adaptable mechanical environment . . . then they will have to be able to recognize its parts and functions, so that they can understand what it is doing to them, and what they are doing to it.”12

It is worth taking seriously Banham’s argument that clip-­on architecture responded not solely to technical changes but to a specifically visual desire. The architectural wish that technology “look like something” crystallized around the capacity to recognize parts and functions, to visualize an “adaptable mechanical environment” that both acted on an imagined public and which this public could, in turn, manipulate. The final paragraphs of “A Clip-­On Architecture” invoked a mode of seeing that shaded into handling, alteration, and reassembly. Banham’s clip-­on architecture promised not simply a different image but one that offered some measure of control over rapid technological changes. The essay began, he noted, with “cautious propositions about what technology might do to aesthetics; we finish with aesthetics offering to give technology its marching orders.”13 The conclusion of “A Clip-­On Architecture” reveals that far from being a technological determinist, Banham’s interest hinged on the determining power of visualization.

The Redefinition of Collage When Banham stressed the importance of “aformal” order in “A Clip-­On Architecture,” he traced this preoccupation back to Philip Johnson’s description of a Pollock drip painting in a lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in the early 1950s.14 A remarkable piece of historical revisionism, Banham passed over in silence the widespread interest in such topics among members of the IG, as well as his own role as one of the chief theorists of such aformal images. The intense fascination with the “image” in the IG milieu was animated by a search for alternative types of coherence, that is, for attitudes to form that would no longer be guided by compositional qualities such as symmetry, harmony, balance, or unity. That such preoccupations were closely associated with an interest in collage and montage was evident from Banham’s review of the largest exhibition of such objects in London at the time. Lawrence Alloway’s 1954 exhibition Collages and Objects at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) gathered dozens of cubist, surrealist, and Dada works and placed them alongside contemporary works by Paolozzi, McHale, and Henderson.15 For the younger 37 CLIPPING

generation of artists, Banham stressed, the interest in the collage and montage paradigm was something other than a question of historical revival. “Collage,” he explained, “cuts deeper, because it is a matter of using something instead of the illusionistic overtones of painting. . . . Collage, anti-­illusionistic and anti-­aesthetic, is one of the basic gestures by which the modern movement was initiated.”16 The interpretation of collage as a new and different type of attention to the physicality of everyday materials was at odds with the formalist interpretation of collage advanced by Clement Greenberg in these years and closer to Alfred H. Barr’s materialist interpretation advanced in the 1930s. For Barr, collage emerged in contrast to the monochromatic decomposition of analytic cubism, marking a shift from “breaking down” to “building up.”17 Such a materialist and anti-­illusory definition of collage also represented a significant departure from the reigning account of cubism’s importance to the modern movement in architecture: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941). There Giedion had infamously juxtaposed Lucia Moholy’s photograph of the glazed corner of the workshop wing of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s Dessau Bauhaus (1925) with Pablo Picasso’s L’arlesienne (1912), arguing that both reflected a specifically twentieth-­century conception of space-­time characterized by an emphasis on the simultaneity of different views, interpenetrating planes, and layered transparency. Banham’s reassessment of collage turned away from Giedion and, implicitly, from a central aspect of the rationalist tradition in architectural theory—­the assumption of the object’s transparency to the mind, its capacity to be fully penetrated and reshaped by human reasoning.18 Banham’s anti-­aesthetic understanding of collage was bound up with an interest in material and epistemological opacity, one that matched the empiricist bias of his historiography and criticism. What interested Banham in collage was not medium specificity but its status as an impure and worldly material and pictorial practice, one capable of challenging assumptions about the rationality of the modern movement, established distinctions between the arts, and ultimately, a hierarchical vision of culture. The stakes of Banham’s interest in informality and materiality in his early journalism became clearer toward the end of the decade, with the publication of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. That book began by questioning the received idea that the modern movement represented a stark break with the academicism of the Beaux-Arts tradition. Academic theory, he argued, enjoyed a robust afterlife at the center of the modern movement itself. Despite Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, or Mies van der Rohe’s repudia­ tions of academicism, the planning principles used in most of their works 38 CLIPPING

remained consistent, he argued, with compositional doctrines initially codified by J. N. L. Durand’s Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique (1805) and later enshrined by Julien Guadet’s Éléments et théorie de l’architecture (1903). Elementary composition represented an essentially “particulate approach” to assembly “common to Academics and Moderns alike.”19 According to these theories, a building’s wholeness resulted from proper compositional assembly, an additive process in which small functional and structural components came together to form larger parts, known as the elements of composition, such as rooms, vestibules, staircases, and entrances. These were further assembled and adjusted according to principles of unity, symmetry, and axiality. Elements such as walls, columns, windows, vaults, and roofs were not subject to reinvention; rather, they were precisely what was already known. Whatever distinctiveness they exhibited derived from the manner in which the architect composed these familiar items.20 Drawing on Banham’s analysis, Claire Zimmerman has persuasively interpreted James Stirling’s Leicester Engineering Building (1964) as a mode of composition by collage, a form of architecture integrating a disparate range of interwar functionalist elements from books and surveys, binding them together within a thin skin of glass, brick, and tile, a surface reminiscent of the building’s photographic sources.21 The link between collage and assembly manifested in Banham’s concept of clip-­on architecture represented something else; a desire for integration no longer reconcilable with ideals of composition. For Banham, theories of elemental composition remained all too present in the modern movement as it achieved cultural dominance in the 1950s.22 The dissatisfaction with assembly-­as-­composition that came to fruition in his theory of clip-­on architecture stemmed from a belief that the modern movement had not yet thrown off its academic hangover. Banham’s antipathy to such a culture of composition was an important part of his theorization of “image” in his landmark article “The New Brutalism” of 1955.23 The fragmentary theory of image it contained has remained its most intriguing aspect for many subsequent historians.24 Banham famously defined the New Brutalism in terms of clarity of structure and the affirmation of raw materials “as found,” yet the defining trait of the emerging movement was not the “formal legibility” of composition exhibited by a work like the Smithsons’ Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) but the qualities of “apprehensible and memorable images.”25 The term image was notoriously vague, yet Banham found it useful for articulating a distinction between a visual experience of “the thing itself, in its totality” as opposed to beauty as an “abstract quality.”26 Such a difference, he stressed, was increasingly bound 39 CLIPPING

FIGURE 1.2. Nigel

Henderson, installation view, A Parallel of Life and Art, ICA, London, 1953. Copyright Nigel Henderson Estate; photograph copyright 2017 Tate, London.

up with photomechanical media, such that the Smithsons’ rejection of the influential neo-­Palladian aesthetics in Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1948) was seen to be synonymous with their embrace of grainy, photographic enlargements. Together with Paolozzi and Henderson, they had assembled a hundred-­odd of such photomechanical surfaces at the ICA for the 1953 exhibition A Parallel of Life and Art, an exhibition Banham cited as the locus classicus of the distinctly postwar turn made by the New Brutalist movement.27 Yet the techniques employed at A Parallel of Life and Art had roots in inter­ war exhibitions. The technique of detaching photographic prints from the wall and presenting them as a suspended three-­dimensional field was used in Herbert Bayer’s exhibition designs of the 1930s—­such as the Werkbund section of the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris 1930 and in his Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938–­39.28 As Bayer, György

Kepes, and other Bauhaus émigrés brought these spatial montage techniques to the United States, they became central to exhibitions mounted at MoMA, including Road to Victory (1942), Airways to Peace (1943), and most famously The Family of Man (1955), a format Fred Turner has called the “democratic surround.”29 A Parallel of Life and Art, like other IG-­related exhibitions of these years, such as Man, Machine, Motion (1955) and This Is Tomorrow (1956), embraced these techniques together with the nonlinear, spatialized, and comparative forms of photographic perception they solicited. Yet unlike these other exhibitions, A Parallel of Life and Art deliberately eschewed the larger overarching narratives and thematic captions that grounded and framed the more ambiguous qualities of photographic signification. The “images” of A Parallel of Life and Art were, technically speaking, less enlargements made from photographic negatives than enlarged reproductions of printed matter.30 The exhibition was relevant, Banham argued, not for any of the particular things it showed, but for the way in which it spatialized a mode of vision characteristic of “camera-­eyed Western man.”31 Such a figure was so conditioned by photographic technologies that he or she “tend[ed] to forget that every photograph is an artifact.”32 It was precisely this forgetting of the photograph’s artifactual qualities that made photographs into “images,” that is, a form of perception defined not by materiality, nor by indexical fidelity to a referent but by analogies and resemblances trigged by as little as a “community of outline and surface texture.”33 Such a condition was one in which superficial and chance likenesses counted as much as real similarities, marking a stark challenge to photography’s “strong moral claims to truth and objectivity.”34 The cultural oppositions through which the New Brutalism was articulated—­clarity and obscurity, abstraction and concreteness, the memo­ rable and the forgettable—­were wrested more from photographic perception than from an inventory of “already known” compositional elements. The postwar “visual environment” described in Banham’s account of photography was a condition flooded by the potential for resemblance and analogy, and demanded an architecture capable of filtering the noise associated with abstract photomechanical particles. It is thus not insignificant that a central example of the shift from formal legibility to aformal imageability was the photomontage the Smithsons created for the Golden Lane Housing competition in 1951–­52 (Plate 3). Contrasting it with the centralized, multi-­axial symmetry exhibited in the plan of their project for the Coventry Cathedral Competition (1951), Banham reminded his readers that while the Golden Lane project was mostly remembered for “having put the idea of the street-­deck back into circulation,” it was just as 41 CLIPPING

“notable for its determination to create a coherent visual image by non-­ formal means, emphasizing visible circulation, identifiable units of habitation, and fully validating the presence of human beings as part of the total image.”35 In drawing attention to the photomontage perspective, rather than the project’s equally informal plan, Banham highlighted a problem of coherence ­directly connected to creating optical consistency between graphic and photo­mechanical materials of different types. Such a consistency was anything but smooth. It was through the undisguised tension between photo­ mechanical particles and drawn lines that Golden Lane’s “parts” stood out. In the photo­montage, the built volume of the Golden Lane complex was indicated by reproducing a small portion of the elevation drawing, which the Smithsons slipped into a physical cut made in the photograph of the bombed competition site. From this fragment, they extended a series of drawn lines directly across the photograph’s surface, a virtual, foreshortened outline that projected sharply toward the picture plane to schematically indicate the ninety-­degree angle of the building’s plan. Both the plan typology and the mode of visualization were reminiscent of the continuous slab housing of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (1935), and even more particularly, of the oversized photomontage mural derived from this scheme and exhibited at the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux in Paris in 1937. The massive mural—­14 meters long by 6 meters tall—­was presented with others conceived with the painters Léon Gischia and Fernand Léger, and was described as a “plastic visualization” of “dwelling” (habiter), the first of the four functions of urbanism codified in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s Athens charter (Plate 4).36 The left portion of the mural was dominated by a photographic enlargement in which “one sees the sky through great bays of glass.”37 Beneath this, a photographic enlargement of a portion of the large Ville Radieuse model constructed in 1935–­36 served as the point of departure for a painted version of the continuous slab building, which wended its way around an equally painterly landscape punctuated by clusters of photographic figures. Terminating at the far right, a foreshortened end wall shoots abruptly toward the picture plane and appears to open up, affording a glimpse into a “dwelling cell permitting silent meditation.”38 Such similarities only underscore the important shifts between the two composite landscapes. A mixture of the painterly and the photographic, the mural evoked a new idea of dwelling more than any specific building project. More important than perspectival consistency was a parallel between the viewer’s physical travel from left to right when viewing the mural and an imagined movement within the mural, from windowed interior through 42 CLIPPING

a playground landscape to silent meditation. The Smithsons’ photomontage, by contrast, integrated figures, textures, and drawing into a perspectival space defined by the site photograph. Yet the perspectival apparatus did not strictly determine the image’s “coherence.” As Banham noted, with so many “photographs of people pasted on to the drawings . . . the human presence almost overwhelmed the architecture.” In Le Corbusier’s montage mural, inhabitants appear in athletic duos or convivial groups, suggestive of the paid holidays introduced by France’s short-­lived Popular Front government in the 1930s. At Golden Lane we see scattered individuals, not groups. Just as importantly, such figures were no longer anonymous. The large cross-­armed figure in the foreground was a cutout of the French actor Gérard Philipe. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, appears on the third-­floor balcony dropping a bale of hay. The young designer Terence Conran leaned out from an opening in the building’s end wall with an unidentified companion.39 These pasted figures marked a series of coordinates that were simultaneously spatial and connotative, such that a visual itinerary through the image retraced not only an “informal” plan but a set of unexplained associations plucked from the pages of contemporary illustrated magazines. Rather than human figures “overwhelming the architecture,” as Banham had argued, photomontage here assembles a hybrid perspective in which a different image of “human presence” appears on an architectural stage.40 In this, the photomontage highlighted a different attitude to the qualities of abstraction and standardi­ zation central to a project like Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Le Corbusier’s appeal to standardization responded to a Fordist economic model whose emphasis on the efficiency of identical assembly line production came to be reconsidered in the postwar period as economic models shifted toward consumer choice and market differentiation.41 The displacement of anonymous inhabitants to famous individuals can be read as one manifestation of such a shift. If standardization remained essential to mass housing, it was now a background against which individual differentiation was to be identified. The demand for “identifiable parts” was equally true of the building as image, an elevation where street-­deck circulation, units of habitation, and yard-­gardens were to be discernable at a glance. Just as the inclusion of slab-­through yard gardens were to pierce the body of the building, so was the typical penetrated by the particular. According to Alison Smithson, these openings were to “dissolve the dead-­wall effect of the conventional slab block, and produce ever-­ changing vignettes of life and sky.”42 The demand for identifiable parts was envisioned as a coherence among various types of reproducible particles, from the site photograph to the figures clipped from magazines, fronds of 43 CLIPPING

vegetation extracted from books, and elevation drawings copied from tracing paper. Such a desire for visual tangibility was not satisfied by lines standing out against a blank sheet of paper; rather, it cohered out of the texture of the bombed site just as a complex figure might emerge from the grainy particles of a photomechanical field.

The Changing Image of Industrialized Assembly Banham’s theorization of image, with its emphasis on tangibility and identification, should be understood not only in relation to photography but in relation to discussions of industrialized assembly taking place in British architectural culture during the 1950s. While Banham omits them from his genealogy of clip-­on architecture, such debates were an important subtext for the emergence of such a concept. A key landmark was the Architectural Review’s “Machine Made America” issue of May 1957, highlighting the renewed importance of questions of assembly. As more and more aspects of buildings were becoming available from industrial catalogs and were effectively designed by the building industry, the nature of the architect’s contribution became a more pressing matter. The assembly of ready-­made elements raised fundamental questions about the architect’s intellectual labor, concerns that hinged on the ability to master the gap separating design and building. Such questions came to the fore in the issue’s embrace of curtain wall systems, the most successful example of the integration of industrial manufacturing and assembly to emerge since World War II. The strong affirmation of curtain walling from the editors of the Architectural Review confronted a lingering unease in British architectural culture with matters of industrial mechanization, which they associated with the “abiding influence” of John Ruskin and William Morris.43 In so doing, the editors singled out a key passage on the relationship of architecture to building in Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ruskin’s definition of building serves very well to describe an important part of the whole of architectural endeavor . . . “the putting together and adjusting of the several pieces of an edifice.” Today this has become a matter of immense complexity involving innumerable specializations, but it is not the architects who are being trained to specialize in them; specialization has not yet been accepted by the majority of architects. They still think of themselves as architects with Ruskin’s capital “A.”44

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The “immense complexity” that industrialization introduced into the world of construction troubled the Ruskinian hierarchy of architecture over building, and any prospect of mastering such a condition demanded a new way of thinking about the architect’s work. The Architectural Review promoted architectural training grounded more firmly in industrial production, proposing a hybrid figure: the architect-­engineer.45 Trained as an architect, yet specialized in a particular domain of building technology, this figure would ideally mediate between the culture of architecture and the world of engineering and factory production, ensuring that architectural quality was designed into the clip-­together components of industrialized assemblages such as curtain walls. Such an industrially oriented specialization was cast, moreover, as part of a necessary rappel à l’ordre. Against the charge that ready-­made curtain walls were monotonously standard and of “low-­emotional content,” the Architectural Review argued that this was a positive constraint. Warning of the recent “litter of buildings attempting to express an emotional content that their designers were neither capable of feeling nor understanding,” the standardization of curtain wall systems held out the promise that a “vernacular of modern architecture may be developing.”46 Properly conceived and put together, such industrially assembled surfaces might remedy the “breakdown of classical discipline in the romantic movement.”47 While the editors of the Architectural Review saw the matter in terms of design principles, more technocratically minded architects welcomed industrialized assembly for different reasons—­as a way to rationalize a complex and uncoordinated building process. Such was the tenor of Roger Walters’s “Towards Industrialized Building,” published in the RIBA Journal the same year.48 An architect and engineer who had served with the Royal Engineers in India during World War II, Walters worked on prefabrication programs with the British Railways and directed research and development at Great Britain’s Ministry of Public Building and Works before becoming architect to the Greater London Council. To gain more holistic architectural control and greater efficiency in construction, he argued, the manual skills of the building trade needed to be remade in the image of factory production: The assembly process itself, instead of being a self-­contained entity as it is now, would take its place as the last of a sequence of processes, all of which would be governed by the same kind of thinking. By the time they reach the building, components would only need to have quite simple operations done to them. They would already

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have been designed to be convenient for lifting and placing in position, and joints would be such as could be made with power-­driven tools, such as spanners and screw-­drivers. Cutting, fitting, mixing, and spreading would be largely eliminated.49

Redesigning the nature of joints and connections went hand in hand with the redesign of construction labor. Greater efficiency depended on forms of assembly that were more abstract, homogeneous, and simplified. Circumventing the manual skills protected by trades, Walters envisioned replacing these with a new specialist: the “assembler-­jointer.”50 Banham’s vision of an architecture consisting of prefabricated elements and clip-­joints presumed just such a figure together with the level of industrialized assembly that Walters described. Industrialized assembly meant the architect “as a designer of building components would become a more important figure. He would need to work closely with the component manufacturer, either as a consultant, or as a member of his firm.”51 By the same token, expertise in composition, a feeling for spatial interpenetration, or an awareness of historical typology would be less essential forms of architectural knowledge. Such a vision was one in which the manual labor of builders became more generalized and abstract, while the intellectual work of architects became increasingly specialized and concrete, a process he described phlegmatically as “a tendency towards integration with a consequent adjustment of individual functions.”52 The positions of the Architectural Review and of Walters were both indebted to Walter Gropius, whose postwar writings sounded an alarm about what he called the “fatal gap between design and building.”53 The greater complexity of the building process had exacerbated such a gap, and to retain aesthetic control Gropius theorized design as a form of collaborative, extended teamwork lead by the architect. On the one hand, this recognized architecture as a form of intellectual work no longer concentrated in the mind and vision of a singular individual. On the other, it continued to affirm a redemptive vision of what he saw as the architect’s “historical mission”: the goal of “integrating through his work all social, technical and esthetic components into a comprehensive, humanly appealing whole.”54 The ability to form something whole out of an increasingly fragmented building process, depended, he argued, on the architect’s “creative vision.”55 Such an appeal to totality would not be content with the clipping together of selected parts; its goal was to form the parts themselves in a more fundamental way. The expanded scope of “total architecture,” Gropius argued, began with “developing the component building parts” with industry, and proceeded to realize “the 46 CLIPPING

design of finished buildings from such component parts, and their actual assembly on the site.”56 Only then, he argued, could something of the organic unity destroyed by industrialization be recovered, and with it the position of the architect as “master builder.” While the Architectural Review, Walters, and Gropius were each moved by different concerns—­disciplinary integrity, efficiency, organic wholeness—­in each case the appeal to unity sought control over the assembly process in order to create enduring and meaningful form. And while each sought to advance the discipline’s engagement with industrialized production and assembly, nowhere in these writings does one find a sense that this engagement entailed a more fundamental rethinking of the permanence and durability of form. For Banham, and a number of his IG colleagues, bringing architecture into line with the most advanced forms of factory production meant thinking about the accelerated cycle of design, production, consumption, and obsolescence that characterized postwar industry. Rather than concentrate on “creative vision” and the shaping of form, a different theoretical vocabulary was developed: one that engaged postwar consumer culture through a materialist understanding of collage and an iconographic practice of clipping. Among the members of the IG, it was perhaps Banham’s colleague John McHale whose practice most emblematized this shift. McHale developed his own approach to iconographic analysis in the second half of the 1950s that was intimately intertwined with practices of clipping and collage. Such a practice operated by collecting and comparing a large number of pages cut from science fiction journals, advertisements, and illustrated lifestyle maga­zines, which served both as material for iconographic investigations into mass media imagery and as the substance for photomontages, collages, and collage-­books.57 McHale’s practice of clipping stressed both side-­by-­side comparisons, sometimes referred to as a “tack board aesthetic,” and a more intensive cutting and reassembly reminiscent of Dada montage. Indeed, one of McHale’s most influential contributions to the IG was the much-­ mythicized trunk of American magazines, records, and other ephemera that his then lover, Magda Cordell, brought back from New Haven to London to share with members of the group, and which he subsequently organized into a series of folders dubbed “palettes.” Lawrence Alloway, McHale’s friend and then curator at the ICA, first drew attention to the importance of McHale’s clipping files for his collage practice. McHale’s collages, he noted, were “slowly assembled out of files of material torn from the magazines, images that reveal the new scale of resemblance and strangeness created by modern photography.”58 McHale refused to see his 47 CLIPPING

collages as autonomous works and stressed instead their connection to the ways in which photomechanical images were touched, seen, and read. Writing about his collages in 1959, he made these dynamics explicit: “Collage as a medium for the construction of these ikons has an appropriateness in its parallel to our actual experience of the image, as we turn the pages of a magazine, watch a movie, or scan a newspaper.”59 It is thus fitting that one of McHale’s best remembered works was the one reproduced on the cover of the Architectural Review’s “Machine Made America” issue in May 1957, a lush accumulation of full-­color photomechanical material culled from his tear sheet collection (Plate 5). Hardly a typical Architectural Review cover—­which were usually designed in a more restrained and lyrical vein by the magazine’s art director, Gordon Cullen—­the editors included some preemptive explanation: The cover personage . . . was assembled from fragments of the cultural complex that he also symbolizes: Machine Made America. The source of the material was one of America’s favorite flattering mirrors, coloured magazine illustrations, and reflects a world of infra-­grilled steak, pre-­mixed cake, dream-­kitchens, dream-­ cars, machine-­tools, power-­mixers, parkways, harbours, tickertape, spark-­plugs and electronics.60

FIGURE 1.3. John McHale, selected materials from Palette #1, London, 1950–­57. Magazine and newspaper tear sheets. Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Magda Cordell McHale.

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On the cover of “Machine Made America,” mechanization appeared menacingly made over in the image of man, an excessive and dense accumulation of textures, colors, and clipped details decidedly unlike the calmly controlled gridded surfaces of curtain wall systems praised in the issue. As Allo­way noted when these works were exhibited at the ICA in 1956, McHale subjected his clippings to

“considerable change and mutilation.”61 The attention to the garish saturation of printed images may well have been sparked by Josef Albers’s color exercises, which McHale encountered at Yale. These asked students to compare and discuss small bits of colored printed paper to instill a sense of the profoundly relational qualities of color.62 The fragments that made up McHale’s Machine-­Made America were valued as colors and textures, but also as parts extracted from things that remained absent. While McHale’s intensive cutting destabilized the identity of his clippings, reassembling them into the iconic gestalt of a human head did the opposite. The result was a work in which it was harder to visually distinguish human from machine, a condition in which form was not the result of material molded to human will but something resulting from an overwhelming material accumulation. It was arguably a new assemblage of the human and the nonhuman that was coming into view in such works. Cake dough and pistons, meat and ball bearings, grass and buttons no longer belonged to different categories of existence but assumed the status of interchangeable parts.63 The crumbling texture of ready-­mix cake, the char marks on “infra-­grilled” beefsteak, and the ambiguous density of meat loaf display a flawlessness, color, and finish worthy of mass-­produced goods, while the sheen of spark plugs, self-­aligning bearings, pistons, and push buttons seem destined to rot. Compared to Hamilton’s more famous photocollage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), partly assembled from materials sent back to London by McHale, Machine-­Made America appears less ironic than grotesque, offering no scene or any tabular inventory of stereotypes to be decrypted (Plate 6).64 Despite the profusion of mechanical bits, Machine-­Made America was no longer about the look of machines, or even of machine parts, things that had been central to the visual lexicon of much photomontage before the war. It was perhaps for this reason that the editors of the Architectural Review likened McHale’s cover not to machines but to mechanization’s effects, which had become “part of almost every detail of our lives, from the mechanized brain to the ‘untouched-­by-­hand cake mix.’ ”65 Mechanization was manifest in the pervasive yet diffuse sense of expendability permeating everyday life. A quality that was difficult to visually isolate and grasp, it called for an iconographic awareness linked to a tactile sensitivity. The more atomized and “mutilated” remainders that McHale extracted from his clipping files to make Machine-­Made America first appeared in singular, complex, and fragile collage books that he began making a few years before. That collage would appear in the guise of a page underscores the importance McHale accorded to the spectator’s experience of handling 49 CLIPPING

magazines and books, and of scanning, extracting, and filing images. Why I Took to the Washers in Luxury Flats (1954) cut out perceptual organs such as eyes and mouths and placed them in a field of newspaper headlines, whereas Shoe-­Life Stories (circa 1954) sliced reproductions of faces vertically and alternated these with textures of objects from a jeweler’s catalog (Plates 7a and 7b). Such vertical cuts were not unlike the glimpses of images seen as one flipped rapidly through a magazine, an effect amplified by McHale’s use of differently sized pages and flaps that enabled the reader to manipulate and rearrange the pages to produce different visual configurations.66 Not unlike the sculptural construction kits he produced during these years, whose form was to be determined by the user, the collage books emphasized how looking, turning pages, and scanning information were not passive forms of contemplation but acts of physical manipulation. In McHale’s books, collage is no longer a work independent of the page but a densely layered ensemble of pages, a reconfigurable image that anticipated the importance of visual tactility and handling within Banham’s concept of clip-­on architecture.

Expendability: Culture as Continuum McHale’s clipping files and collage books were part of a wider iconographic interest in the expendable culture of the emerging consumer economy of the 1950s. Such an interest was central to the second phase of the IG meetings that McHale convened with Alloway in 1954–­55. Banham’s notion of the “aesthetics of expendability” appeared in his 1955 essay “Vehicles of Desire,” a text ostensibly devoted to the styling of the 1954 Cadillac convertible, but whose larger argument addressed the lack of any “formulated attitudes for living in a throwaway economy” in postwar architecture and design culture.67 A commitment to abstraction and a belief in the architect as form giver, Banham argued, were no longer a sufficient basis for aesthetic thinking in the 1950s. What the Cadillac convertible—­and implicitly the “throwaway economy” for which it stood—­demanded was the ability to read and analyze the “symbolic iconographies” expressed in such an object. The power of such iconographies, he continued, “lies in their grounding in popular taste and the traditions of the product, while the actual symbols are drawn from Science-­ Fiction, movies, earth-­moving equipment, supersonic aircraft, racing cars, heraldry, and certain deep-­seated mental dispositions about the great outdoors and the kinship between technology and sex.”68 The complex articulation between desire, iconography, and industrial production in automotive design, he noted, differed from architectural production precisely to the ex50 CLIPPING

tent that stylists and engineers developed their iconographic assemblages in response to consumer research and tested them in a rapidly changing mass market.69 Banham’s appeal to desire echoed a psychoanalytic vocabulary introduced into marketing in the 1950s, while the appeal to iconographic analysis—­derived from his art historical training at the Courtauld Institute—­ was blown wide open to include everything from earth-­moving equipment to science fiction.70 If Banham, like others in the IG, did not share the influential Freudo-­Marxist critique of the culture industry developed during the same period by members of the Frankfurt School, this was partly because he emphasized the status of commodities as visual entities demanding an active form of iconographic interpretation and analy­sis.71 Such an iconographic analysis marked an important difference from the ambiguous resemblances and analogies sought in the raw textures of the brutalist “image.” The grainy enlargements of A Parallel of Life and Art, like the Smithsons’ Golden Lane photomontage, solicited the ambiguities and instabilities of perception characteristic of a photographically conditioned “camera-­eyed Western man.” The aesthetics of expendability, by contrast, turned to mechanics of signification; they trafficked not in form but in widely recognizable symbolic conventions.72 While Banham, like McHale, displaced art historical practices of iconography toward a more general semiology, this was not in the mold of an emerging structuralism but toward an interest in popular conventions. That such images were conventional did not mean they were predictable or stable. Banham’s description suggests a highly volatile composite, “a thick ripe stream of symbols, apt to go off in the face of someone who doesn’t know how to handle them.”73 The appeal to visual desire that he had stressed in the conclusion to “A Clip-­On Architecture” was a return to the potentially explosive iconographies already formulated in his “aesthetics of expendability.” For Banham and McHale, the interest in iconography was linked to the clipping of tear sheets and other disposable images. It was less the deciphering of meaning in an established tradition than a way to isolate and extract materials from a flow, a “thick ripe stream” of potentially explosive expendable communications.74 Such dynamics are explicit in McHale’s article “The Expendable Ikon,” published in two installments in the magazine Architectural Design in 1959.75 McHale began by stressing the difference between icon—­which he insisted on spelling as ikon—­and the term that Banham had mobilized a few years previously: image. Image, he noted, “has been taking something of a beating.”76 The “loaded image” was decried as a tool of “hidden persuasion” by sociologists such as Vance Packard, while its vagueness meant that it could describe “anything which supplied visual kicks.”77 51 CLIPPING

Describing pages from his tear sheet collection that were used as illustrations for the article, he noted that “the practice of collecting such material has been widespread. But such is the scope, volume, and pace of the mass media that the simple act of extracting an image from the continuum to pin up, thereby alters its status, and almost becomes an academic gesture.”78 Here clipping was recognized as something more than simply detaching a reproduction from its printed substrate; it was tantamount to removing an object from the continuity of a cultural field. True to the dual valence of the term, clipping extracted and decontextualized icons and in so doing permitted a new type of reassembly. Clipping an image altered it, even if its physical substance was not rearranged or physically modified. McHale extracted and compared robots, rockets, computers, clocks, screens, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and more, arguing that these printed icons had taken over the role played by more permanent “symbolic constructs” in earlier periods. In such a theory, the understanding of media latent in the aesthetics of expendability opened a path for thinking cars, appliances, printed images, film stars, and buildings as techniques for articulating and transmitting messages. As icons, the Cadillac, the electric razor, and the pop star, McHale argued, made pervasive yet unseen currents of popular desire visible to many, “enabling man to locate in, and deal with, his environment,” a form of orientation that poems, masks, totems, murals, and cathedrals had once provided.79 The emphasis on orientation in McHale’s expendable icon already implied a spatial framework, a framework equally characteristic of Banham’s and Alloway’s writings. All three modeled the growing influence of communications research during these years in terms of a spatial continuum. Banham’s “Vehicles of Desire” described automobile styling as “an extraordinary continuum of emotional-­engineering-­by-­public-­consent” linking designers, engineers, market research, factory production, and the consuming public, while McHale emphasized that his clippings were but fragments of a “media continuum.”80 Alloway echoed both when he articulated his notion of a “fine-­ art/popular-­art continuum,” one of the most influential concepts to emerge from IG discussions.81 “Acceptance of the media,” he wrote, “in a descriptive account of a society’s communication system, is related to modern arrangements of knowledge in non-­hierarchic forms.”82 Such an antihierarchical emphasis, it has often been noted, opposed ideas of cultural leadership, whether embedded in the aesthetics of the ICA’s founders, such as Herbert Read, or in Gropius’s conception of the architect’s “historical mission.”83 In Alloway’s oft-­cited description, the flattening of cultural hierarchies was a direct result of more expendable print media: 52 CLIPPING

Mass production techniques, applied to accurately repeatable words, pictures, and music, have resulted in an expendable multitude of signs and symbols. . . . Acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our notion of what culture is. Instead of reserving the word for the highest artefacts and the noblest thoughts of history’s top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of “what a society does.” Then, unique oil paintings and highly personal poems as well as mass-­distributed films and group-­aimed magazines can be placed within a continuum rather than frozen in layers in a pyramid.”84

To conceive of culture as continuum meant envisioning a horizontal field filled with continuously distributed matter, in which distinctions between above and below, vulgar and refined, superior and inferior were relativized. Such a field deprived the artist and architect of any privileged external position from which to lead or shape public taste, yet the continuum model did not mean all was homogenized. Differences between pop art and fine art, or between architecture and industrial design still mattered, yet these were understood as relative and relational, rather than definitively separate spheres. As positions within a shared condition of cultural production, their relationships could be altered. The continuum concept also implied a shift in the relation of technique to culture. Architects no longer imposed shape on raw materials, or composed objects from unchanging elements; rather, cultural forms were a product of acts that rearranged and reassembled the material of a larger cultural continuum. Just as significantly, spectatorship mattered as much as authorship in the continuum model; as cultural differences were established by means of a more intimate link between reception and production. Such a horizontalized conception of culture was necessary for clipping to describe both a cultural strategy and a type of impermanent structural attachment. The most concerted effort to instantiate such a horizontalized conception of culture as a physical space was the exhibition This Is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. Organized by Theo Crosby, an editor, curator, and former IG member, the exhibition brought together artists and architects active in the Independent Group as well as key figures associated with British constructivism. The most cited exhibition in accounts of postwar British art, it is often remembered for Group Two—­put together by McHale, Hamilton, and John Voelcker—­hailed as an originary scene for British pop, and the New Brutalist exhibit, mounted by Group Six (the Smithsons, 53 CLIPPING

Henderson, and Paolozzi). Rather than interpret the exhibition through stylistic differences—­between pop, brutalism, and constructivism—­it is worth reconsidering how the theory of culture as continuum collided with another central preoccupation of the period, namely, the long-­standing modernist ambition toward a “synthesis of the arts.”85 This Is Tomorrow asked how artists, architects, and designers might collaborate amid the pronounced skepticism toward any unified or universal design principles. It had emerged from the rejection of the ideas of synthesis advanced by the Paris-­based Groupe Espace, yet in not abandoning the idea of collaboration completely, it testified to an ongoing search for possible common ground among painters, architects, sculptors, and graphic designers.86 Each group was allotted roughly the same amount of space and the same budget for the erection of an exhibit within the undivided interior of the White­chapel Gallery. Exhibits were neither titled nor attributed to authors but numbered, like anonymous competition entries. Two contributions appear particularly important for examining practices of clipping: Group Twelve (Alloway, Geoffrey Holroyd, and Toni del Renzio) and Group One (Crosby, Edward Wright, William Turnbull, and Germano Facetti). Group Twelve exhibited an “assembly kit” composed of a wooden frame, struts, colored Perspex panels, photographs, and tear sheets from magazines, a system for categorizing and juxtaposing “images” according to various categories. Inspired by the practice of clipping among members of the IG, and by Holroyd’s interest in the House of Cards game from Charles Eames and Ray Eames, the kit aimed to provide “[a] lesson in ‘how to read a tack board,’ a tack board being a convenient method of organizing the modern visual continuum according to each individual’s decision.”87 Where Group Twelve sought to assemble and parse the “visual continuum” through codes and categories arrayed on a temporary, demountable screen, Group One devised an environment in which a range of graphic panels defined a space within a horizontal continuum. The installation, positioned in the Whitechapel Gallery’s entryway, was “modulated by plastic sheets, block board, and plywood” treated with “photographic techniques or a collage of printed elements,” all of which were suspended from a ready-­made space-­frame system. The commercial availability of such space frames in the UK was a new phenomenon in the 1950s; Crosby had procured the system used at This Is Tomorrow as a donation by the firm Space Deck Limited.88 Like curtain walls, space frames were equally exemplary of principles of industrialized assembly. Designed for automated factory production and simple, rapid erection using basic tools and skills, the catalog described them as one of the “constituent elements” of postwar pro54 CLIPPING

duction.89 In such a structure, the standardized individual components were made continuous through a calibrated equilibrium that distributed loads and forces throughout the entire assemblage.90 More than strictly functional, the discontinuous continuity of such demountable space-­frame systems was heralded as a symbol of the postwar “mechanical environment,” a condition more readily likened to the diffuse efficiency of a lattice-­like, flexible, and isotropic structural system than it was to any particular machine.91 The theoretically endless continuity implied by the Space Deck recalled Llewellyn Davies’s analysis of the “endlessness” characteristic of Mies van der Rohe’s Alumni Hall, of which Crosby was certainly aware. Perhaps more pertinent, however, was Mies’s effort in the early 1940s to redefine and reappro­ priate long-­span industrial structures for specifically cultural purposes in projects such as his Museum for a Small City (1941–­43), and his projects for a concert hall (1942) and a convention center in Chicago (whose structural system was to be an enormous space frame) (1953–­54). Techniques of long-­span construction were intimately related to the continuity of assembly-­line production, which demanded flexible, column-­free interiors. The attraction of such long-­span structures for Mies has been received in terms of the notion of an open “universal” space, a single, glass-­clad volume articulated through subdivision rather than the additive assembly of rooms. In each case, Mies FIGURE 1.4. Lawrence Alloway, Geoffrey Holroyd, and Toni del Renzio (Group Twelve), installation view, This Is Tomorrow, 1956. Copyright June Holroyd.

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FIGURE 1.5. Group One, installation view, This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Gallery, 1956. Photograph by Sam Lambert. Copyright RIBA, London.

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had turned to techniques of photocollage to visualize the subdivision and articulation of such universal spaces.92 The most dramatic of these was Mies’s enormous photocollage of a concert hall created on the surface of an enlarged reproduction of Albert Kahn’s Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Assembly Building in Baltimore (Plate 8). The delicate positioning of textured paper and photomechanical reproductions created a sense of tension between shallow spatial enclosure and the theo­retically endless extension of an industrial frame, an appropriation—­as Neil that proceeded Levine has pointed out—­ by eliminating the visibility of the bombers produced in the factory.93 Group One’s installation can be seen as a rough-­and-­ready-­made homage to this vein of Mies’s postwar work, yet it also turned to a substantially different concept of culture. Crosby’s design for the cover of the August 1956 issue of Architectural Design reporting on This Is Tomorrow once again turned to collage to visualize the emerging clip-­on principle (Plate 9). In contrast to Mies’s photocollage perspectives, Crosby traced out the plan of the space deck, compressing the three-­ dimensional web essential to its structural integrity into a nearly flat grid. The result was an ambiguous technical ground, at once a diagrammatic outline of structure and something reminiscent of typographic guides used for page layout. Crosby’s cover overlaid the roof system with a graphic horizontality reminiscent of what Leo Steinberg famously described as the flatbed picture plane. Exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, flatbed pictures stood in contrast to both the Albertian metaphor of the picture as window and to the flatness championed by Greenbergian formalism. The flatness of the flatbed picture, he argued, was horizontal rather than vertical: it was akin to “tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—­any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be perceived, printed, impressed.”94 In Crosby’s collage, the continuous distribution of loads through a space frame construction system became a “receptor surface” for a distributed cultural continuum. Yet however thin

and shallow, such horizontality was never strictly flat, or depthless; rather, it is within a compressed technical domain associated with printing and impression that a different kind of shallow yet layered depth distinguished itself from flatness. The outline of a leaf, a photographic impression of Turnbull’s sculpture Sungazer (1956), and two graphic marks reminiscent of arrows or jet wings formed an optically uniform layer hovering just above the lines of the hand-­drawn grid. Such layered horizontality was articulated in a related yet distinct manner in This Is Tomorrow’s catalog. The modest, square-­format, spiral-­bound book was designed by Edward Wright. An architect–­turned–­graphic designer, Wright taught an influential experimental typography class at the Central School and had helped Crosby with layout when he was starting at Architectural Design.95 The catalog’s horizontalized layout, like the Group One exhibit, accommodated the conflicting demands for autonomy and collabo­ ration. Wright’s basic frame shifted from the individual page to the horizontal double-­page spread, which was laid out and printed as a single unit and subsequently cut, punched, and spiral bound. Such a format implied a continuous sequence in which beginning and end were relative rather than absolute, a mode of fastening entirely different from the folded and bound signatures typically used in book printing. A device tied to the world of product catalogs, manuals, and reports, spiral bindings held together information in need of constant updating, an expendable device linked to the intellectual work of the architect in an age of industrialized assembly. The horizontalized conception of the page in Wright’s catalog was also connected with changing means of print production. This Is Tomorrow was notable for being an early use of photo-offset lithography for book production, a technique that was coming to be a viable challenge to industrial letter­ press printing in the latter half of the 1950s, but had been more commonly used for color packaging and illustrations.96 The appeal of photo-offset lithography cannot be chalked up solely to expediency—­what it might have lacked in reproduction quality it gained in the potential for more direct involvement in shaping the relation of text and image, as well as in the range and type of material that could be included on a pasteup.97 It was not simply that This Is Tomor­row featured more collages; rather, Wright’s design provided a model that aligned the procedures of the pasteup with a repertoire of techniques drawn from the collage and montage paradigm. Individual spreads became more hetero­geneous, densely layered, and shallow, just as their sequencing was structured by abrupt montage-­like collisions and discontinuities. Rather than use a conventional table of contents, Wright included a plan of the 57 CLIPPING

FIGURE 1.6. Illustrated

double page from This Is Tomorrow exhibition catalog, Whitechapel Gallery, 1956. Offset lithography. One Way, One Way, by Group One (Theo Crosby, Germano Facetti, Edward Wright, and William Turnbull). Digital image from Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Copyright Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

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exhibition, likening the graphic horizontality of the pages to a promenade through the gallery. This turned out to be important, as the catalog was the only device providing visitors with information as they navigated the heterogeneous exhibition.98 The catalog reveled in the differences in texture and relationship of graphic material; in its pages one finds woodblock letterforms, typewriter text, stenciled lettering, blueprint plans, ink brush drawings, pen sketches, notebook pages, collages, photographs, diagrams, handwriting, and drawn letters. It was the tension between disjunction and synthesis that likely appealed to Wright—­the pasteup served as a graphic framework allowing each group to assemble their materials by means of one process, one analogous to conceptual framework of “antagonistic cooperation” guiding the exhibition.99 As compact offset presses became increasingly accessible as a retail service in the early 1960s, formerly distinct aspects of print production—­design, artwork preparation, typesetting, block making, printing—­were radically simplified into a process that could be boiled down to pasteup creation, on the one hand, and photomechanical capture, platemaking, and printing, on the other. It was this technical shift, in which an expanded ability to transfer things photomechanically combined with a deskilling of the reproduction process, that provided a key ingredient for the explosion of little magazines that Banham and others noted in the 1960s.100 Yet the technical shift alone would not have been sufficient. The different attitude to clipping apparent on the pages of This Is Tomorrow was just as crucial.

As Beatriz Colomina has observed, in Mies’s collages for museum interiors, space was defined less by means of walls than by the interplay of freestanding artworks.101 In Group One’s installation, the role once played by the work of art has been taken over by a wider range of graphic materials, from drawings and signs to an abstract geometrical motif, and tinted and textured Plexiglas sheeting.102 Relieved of any supporting role, vertical partitions were solely a way to articulate and define areas within the horizontal continuum. In retrospect, Group One’s exhibit can be seen as an early instance of the clip-­on typology, though of a type different from what Banham would come to theorize. Suspended not only in space but also in significance, it was uncertain whether the panels should be read as painterly mark or written word, artwork or information, directional indicator or geometric composition. As architecture ceded the fixity of the vertical plane in defining boundaries and composing spaces, the logic of spatial delimitation merged not only with that of exhibition but with a model of cultural continuity associated with communications. Yet something of the opposite was also true. Suspended in such a manner, the communicative potential of symbols and signs depended on a viewer’s position and movement through space. The horizontal structural system mediated between the will to engage in collaboration and the insistence that differentiation be respected. Group One’s exhibition offered less a synthesis than a framework in which to observe differences between the selected objects; as Crosby noted, “The approach to integration was that of antagonistic collaboration, a set of images and an object were placed in a context and left to fight it out.”103 An older discourse of integration had aspired to shape different parts so that, when assembled, they would form a new totality; here integration depended on conflict and on the judgment of a spectator who mentally puts together the various parts of the exhibition.

What Architecture of Technology? It was in the years between This Is Tomorrow and the rise of magazines like Archigram and Clip-­Kit that clip-­on architecture emerged as a concept with a theoretical consistency. To grasp this transition, we must return to Banham’s description of Archigram as providing “the first effective image of the architecture of technology since Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic domes.” Banham began using the phrase “architecture of technology” in the early 1960s, part of his conviction that postwar architectural culture was defined by a stark opposition between tradition and technology. Such an argument was laid out in the conclusion to his Theory and Design in the First Machine 59 CLIPPING

Age  and extended in a series of articles published under the title “Stock­ taking” in the Architectural Review in 1960.104 The radical opportunity of “an architecture of technology,” Banham argued, lay in envisioning architecture out of the changing forces of technological development, rather than looking to accommodate new technologies to established architectural forms and functions. “What Architecture of Technology?” was the title of a 1962 article extending Banham’s argument. Chastising the “heroically naïve” character of the “abundance of high-­sounding pronouncements on the relationship of architecture to technology” at the International Union of Architects’ Sixth Congress held in London in 1961, he singled out his old friend Peter Smithson’s claim that “we are really at the very beginning of an architecture of technology.”105 For nearly two centuries, Banham replied, modern architecture had been defined by a succession of “architectures of technology,” from cast-­iron facades to mill-­cut timber, and from primitive to more sophisticated systems of reinforced concrete. Yet he also conceded that something was changing in “the no-­man’s land between architecture and technology” of the early 1960s. He stressed that “reinforced concrete, geodesic domes, irradiated plastics will not, of themselves, revolutionize architecture,” yet “a general mental accommodation towards technology and its mental disciplines,” together with a practical effort to make architecture out of “the products and usages of technology,” might.106 It was precisely this combination of a “mental accommodation towards technology” and direct forms of practical experimentation that enabled clip-­on components to become “clip-­on” architecture. Banham tended to use the term technology not only to describe machines and mechanized parts resulting from industrial production but to designate something more abstract—­technology as a “potential” and “force” profoundly transforming human experience and thought—­capable of unsettling the routines and assumptions of what he, following Charles Eames, called the profession’s “operational lore.”107 The capacity for technology to profoundly disrupt such operational lore was less a threat to disciplinary integrity than an opportunity for intellectual expansion and renewal. As Leo Marx has noted, the use of technology to denote technical objects and forces, rather than as a form of knowledge devoted to the “mechanical arts”—­the term’s initial meaning since the eighteenth century—­is quite recent, gaining popular currency in the Anglophone world as late as the 1930s.108 The use of technology in such a capacity, he argues, filled a semantic void associated with widespread sociocultural changes that could no longer be described by older terms such as machine, mechanism, or industry. Crucial to this shift was the

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rise of complex sociotechnological systems, such as railroads, telephone networks, broadcast systems, and automobile corporations. Such sociotechnical systems were entities that, while they often produced and operated machinery and mechanical parts, could no longer be identified in terms of “single, free-­standing, more or less self-­contained mechanical devices.”109 Marx’s argument provides a way to reinterpret Banham’s claim that the value of the “image of an architecture of technology” lay in its capacity to fill a looming visual void. If the “wonders of technology” had a “habit of going invisible,” this was not a failure of the imagination but a feature of a condition in which such sociotechnological systems could no longer be grasped in terms of the iconography of machines and machine parts on which interwar architectural culture had relied. Rather, a new layered and composite image, drawn from practices of collage and offset printing, mediated between the abstraction of “technology” and a notion of culture-­as-­continuum. Looking at the architecture of the 1961 International Union of Architects (UIA) congress enables one to gauge starkly differing articulations of what “an architecture of technology” meant at this hinge point. While largely forgotten, the congress was notable for being an event in which many former IG members took part, together with a younger generation of painters emerging from the Royal College of Art. This was largely due to Theo Crosby, who curated the exhibitions—­one documenting recent advances in technological building around the world and another on recent British art—­and designed the buildings and grounds for the congress.110 Crosby conceived of the two main buildings—­the headquarters and exhibition pavilion—­as contrasting architectural comments on the technological theme of the 1961 meeting. The headquarters building was to unite industrial materials, advanced manufacturing, and aesthetic collaboration into an integrated, organic whole. Crosby worked with painters and sculptors associated with British constructivism—­ John Ernest, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin, and William ­Turnbull—­as well as the largest building materials corporations in the UK, which donated the materials for the buildings.111 Architect and artists used a shared set of modular dimensions and a common palette of materials—­ ranging from asbestolux panels and glass to Perspex and aluminum. The exhibition hall, by contrast, pursued an alternative to such synthesis. Its main structural element was the same space-­frame system that Crosby had used at This Is Tomorrow, a “mechanical environment” in the service of an exhibition devoted to technology in architecture. The exhibition building was a top-­lit interior with no visual access to the surroundings but extended on both ends

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FIGURE 1.7. Theo Crosby, Exhibition and Headquarters Pavilions, International Union of Architects Congress, London, 1961.

Photographer unknown, Barratts Press Agency. Collection of University of Brighton Design Archives.

FIGURE 1.8. Theo Crosby, with contributions by John Ernest, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin, and William

Turnbull, Congress Pavilion, 1961. Frank Newby, structural engineer. Photograph by Henk Snoek. Copyright RIBA, London.

into enclosed courtyards. These contained exhibitions of industrially manufactured works of art by many former members of the IG, which vied with the panoramic view of the Thames and Whitehall. The UIA complex eclipsed anything that Crosby had achieved previously and was instrumental in propelling him to influential positions in the early 1960s.112 Yet his extensive comments on the project were decidedly uncertain about technology’s capacity to revolutionize architecture and about the architect’s ability to achieve coherence and control in a more technologically complex building industry. Recent advances in industrialized assembly, Crosby argued, neither expanded the architect’s role nor resulted in greater mastery of the construction process. If anything, the opposite appeared to be the case: “We tend to become an increasingly two-­tier ­profession . . . one tier concerned with architecture as art, the other with building.” The artists, Crosby noted, were having “an increasingly thin time, in spite of the star system and endless publicity,” while the architect engaged primarily in building was “losing control to the manufacturer, [whose] disciplines are mainly economic.”113 Yet “architectural control” was not inevitably lost; it might be retained, he argued, “by developing aesthetic methods of handling

FIGURE 1.9. Theo

Crosby, interior of Exhibition Pavilion, International Union of Architects Congress, London, 1961. Photograph by Henk Snoek. Copyright RIBA, London.

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prefabricated pieces.”114 The exhibition pavilion was an object lesson of sorts in such “aesthetic methods,” one that demonstrate[d] the plight of the architect in an increasingly mechanized building industry. He becomes a manipulator of prefabricated parts; his building a collage of bits and pieces, and he shows his inventiveness by taking some parts from technologies that are not his own—­in this case, scaffolding and polyethylene.115

Crosby’s collage metaphor highlighted an important transformation in the meaning of integration and wholeness. Linking collage to the manipulation of prefabricated elements made collage something other than a discrete medium. Rather, it appeared as an expanded procedure enabling a different kind of architectural control amid an increasingly complex building process. Crosby’s invocation of collage marked a radical departure from previous discourses about industrialized assembly, valorizing the appropriation, manipulation, and recombination of existing technological elements over and against a “creative” and “total” vision that sought to master the heteronomous conditions of industrial production by reshaping its basic elements and their assembly processes. The exhibition hall materialized the ambivalence latent in Crosby’s collage analogy. On the one hand, the architect was more fully subject to the decisions of the building industry, but at the same time, Crosby hinted at a bolder capacity for appropriating new materials and systems. With collage, the hand, which the industrialization of building was determined to elimi­ nate, makes something of a return. Yet it is neither the authorial hand of the master’s sketch nor the hand of craft legible in workmanship. The virtual tactility of collage envisioned aesthetic manipulation as a means to a recovery of technical control. Aesthetic control was more than simply specifying prefabricated parts; rather, the architect showed a dexterity with material contrasts, an inventiveness in the manipulation of parts, and a knowledge capable of appropriating techniques normally beyond the discipline’s purview. The juxtaposition of rough timber planking and common concrete block and the interplay of photographic enlargements on tinted Perspex beneath a continuous metallic space frame were one aspect of such manipulation, whose more conspicuous and extreme expression lay in the rejection of any effort to unify interior and exterior. If the exhibition hall’s space-­frame interior symbolized a mechanical environment, as it had at This Is Tomorrow, this was achieved by walling it off from any contact with the world beyond. The 64 CLIPPING

exterior, by contrast, was not integrated with the interior but explicitly conceived “as a kind of bill board,” a part of the urban-­commercial continuum.116 Crosby called on his frequent collaborator Edward Wright to design the complex graphic system of painted letters that covered the vertical wood cladding. The conference’s slogan—­“Architecture of Technology”—­was spelled out in what Wright called a “graphic envelope,” in which ambiguously tectonic letters in English, French, Spanish, and Russian appeared as stacked and interlocked parts.117 Here the “architecture of technology” literally took the form of a ready-­made space-­frame structure wrapped in a rough yet colorful communicative envelope from which it was formally and materially disconnected, a strategy anticipating Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s notion of the “decorated shed.”118 Yet where Venturi and Scott Brown’s decorated sheds accepted their status as surfaces determined by the hetero­ nomous forces of commercial communication, Crosby and Wright’s pavilion

FIGURE 1.10. Edward

Wright, mural for Exhibition Pavilion, UIA Congress, London, 1961. Copyright Edward Wright Estate. Collection of Edward Wright Archive, Department of Typography, University of Reading.

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did not. Architecture still aimed to make a statement about technology rather than be determined by commerce, to retain control over the legibility and character of the billboard’s surface.119 Crosby’s old IG colleague Lawrence Alloway captured the ambivalence of the UIA project succinctly in his review of the complex: The assemblage of various arts into a unity has encountered insuperable difficulties (so far) in the 20th century when permanence is aimed at. However, once permanence is waived, brilliant combinations of the arts become possible. Synthesis in the arts thrives in the 20th century, but only when the whole is expendable.120

If the more total ambitions of the interwar years were deemed expendable and consigned to the scrap heap, the whole had not quite disappeared. “The prestige of utopian integration,” Alloway noted, “still haunts the imaginations of architects.”121 Alloway’s “expendable whole” was an explicitly temporary form of coherence, whose source was the cultural moment. It was a provisional fusion of changeable messages and impermanent materials, geared toward the integrating capacities of spectators. Crosby’s collaborations with artists and graphic designers at UIA were acutely aware of the failures of the utopian ambitions invested in ideas of synthesis, yet he was equally reticent of the pressures of economic rationalization, disciplinary compartmentali­ zation, and the narrowing division of labor that industrialization entailed. The historical legacy of collage was retrieved and expanded within the historical space of this tension. No longer the master builder to which Gropius appealed, or the designer-­organizer outlined by Walters, Crosby’s turn to collage posited a form of visual-­technical assembly that was primary, a way to envision relationships between elements that the architect had not designed and to which he was not normally entitled. If assembly became more primary, it also became more amorphous and circumscribed by time; constituted in a newly promiscuous movement between physical and optical, graphic and tectonic, the products of commerce and the demands of the discipline.

Clip-­Kit Banham may have knocked the “heroically naïve” statements made at the UIA congress, yet his own criticism was hardly lacking in heroism. Banham’s emerging theory of clip-­on architecture arguably took up the more optimistic moment of Crosby’s comments on collage and theorized them more 66 CLIPPING

fully, stressing the value of architectural procedures that appropriated and reassembled materials and technologies from an array of different domains. From the first time he used the term in print, the clip-­on concept stressed this appropriative dimension. Banham’s comments, like those of Crosby, emerged in a context concerned about the loss of control associated with prefabrication. Yet unlike Crosby, he welcomed the intrusion of other specialists into areas formerly defined by the architect.122 The profession, he argued, had “assimilated prefabrication as a technique applied to fairly small repetitive components to be assembled on site,” an attitude to industrialized assembly that left “the determination of functional volumes securely in the hands of architects.”123 If one looked to the most recent developments in the plastics industry, by contrast, one found engineers designing components “large enough to be effective determinants of functional volumes,” the result of which implied a very different kind of assembly: “a house put together from large, non-­repeating units,” in which “rooms might be treated as expendable clip-­on components.”124 However modest in its first articulation, Banham’s interest in clipping as the temporary connection of large units was neither strictly pragmatic nor functional; rather, it stressed a mode of visual and spatial assembly that broke with traditions of elemental composition. As entire rooms and functional volumes became ready-­made “component parts,” this implied a drastic departure from the “particulate” type of control exerted by the Beaux-Arts tradition. The plastics engineer’s vision of prefabrication reflected Banham’s interest in science and technology as a “dynamic force,” capable of fundamentally upending the profession’s “operational lore.” Yet his clip-­on vision remained both less vitalist than the Futurism he recovered during these years and less comprehensive than the “design science” advocated by R. Buckminster Fuller, his other key protagonist. The clip-­on concept, by contrast, valorized an architectural approach that was piecemeal rather than comprehensive, one that eschewed invention in favor of clever adaptation and recombination of developments in adjacent technical fields. The clip-­on theory was taken up by a generation of architects emerging in the wake of the Independent Group, who were concerned as much with the processes through which information and ideas were gathered from other domains as they were with the materials and component parts. Such an emphasis partly reflected the fact that information and images gleaned from catalogs, prospectuses, journals, articles, and newspapers were more readily available than the materials themselves. Here the two senses of c­ lipping—­as  an architectural logic of indeterminate, flexible, and expendable industrial attachment­and as a process of cutting, collecting, and reassembling printed 67 CLIPPING

matter—­came together. Yet for a generation used to scouring printed matter for the latest technical and cultural developments, it was entirely consistent that a clip-­on architecture would concern as much the techniques through which pages were constructed as it would the clipping together of components to make buildings. Such an alignment was at the heart of Banham’s defense of “architectural protest magazines” produced by this younger generation, which were receiving both heightened attention and rebukes in the mid-­1960s.125 Banham’s brief article “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture,” published in New Society a few months after “A Clip-­On Architecture” came out in Design Quarterly, mounted an impassioned rebuttal of such critiques, one that served as an implicit defense of his own clip-­on concept.126 The article highlighted Clip-­Kit: Studies in Environmental Design, a magazine launched at the beginning of 1966 by Peter Murray and Geoffrey Smyth, two students at the Architectural Association. Clearly indebted to Banham’s “clip-­on” theory, the historian repaid Murray and Smyth’s appropriation of his concept by glossing their hyphenated title for readers unfamiliar with the youthful lingo: Clip-­Kit’s title puts it right in the Movement: two more charisma-­ laden words just don’t exist in this context. “Kit” is the emotive collective noun for Goodies (which are usually ideas, images, forms, documents, concepts raided from other disciplines) and “clip” is how you put them together to make intellectual or physical structures.127

Banham’s concern fixes less on the qualities of physical joints and connectors than on processes of displacement and transposition, how the intellectual assets of other fields might be appropriated and recombined for architectural purposes. The physical form of Clip-­Kit embodied such an ethos of transfer and repurposing. The “clip” holding it together was a plastic binding system developed by the Morris Brothers Company and marketed as a “colorful and efficient method for keeping office and factory organized.”128 Interwar magazines such as L’architecture vivante had taken the form of portfolios of unbound pages, yet there the effort was to underscore the fine quality of the printing, which often included pochoir-­tinted photographs. Clip-­Kit’s unbound pages stressed cheapness and the rapidly changing nature of information; indeed, it was arguably less a magazine than a filing device. Subscribers were encouraged to supplement, remove, or otherwise rearrange the volleys of A4 pages they received in the post, in effect producing their own clipping 68 CLIPPING

file. Clip-­Kit ingeniously reenvisioned a device for bureaucratic paper management as the spine for a rudi­mentary indeterminate and open information system. Following the lead of This Is Tomorrow’s spiral binding, its physical form had become lighter and even less fixed, fastening together a range of equally lightweight clip-­on technologies compiled from areas such as plastics manu­facturing, pneumatics, do-­it-­yourself caravan conversions, paper furniture, and NASA’s space program. As with McHale’s reconfigurable collage books, the activities of reading and clipping blurred into each other, becoming a form of reader participation that extended the practices through which the editors created the journal. If the qualities of such clip-­on architecture were indebted to practices of clipping from the 1950s, they ultimately engaged more radically unstable forms of interchangeability and reassembly that went beyond McHale’s collage books or Crosby’s graphic space frames. Banham stressed the combination of existing technical devices and materials over and against any preexisting, abstract, form-­endowing principles—­qualities that were unpredictable and immanent rather than stable and transcendent. Rather than composition, or form giving, this was a type of assembly arising out of transfer operations through which new components and materials were graphically appropriated. A key point of reference for such operations was “technology transfer” programs like those initiated by NASA during the 1960s, whose aim was to accelerate and intensify the development of “applications in the civilian industrial sector of the economy for the advances in science and technology coming out of the extensive Federal research and development effort.”129 Murray and Smyth clipped and pasted passages from NASA about such technological “spin-­off,” highlighting such things as ultra-­thin Mylar “echo skins,” solar cell batteries, air bearings, and printed circuits.130 The process of transferring astronautic technology to civilian applications did not leave the transferred material unchanged. A short NASA text cut and placed in Clip-­Kit advised that “transfer needs to be a purposeful activity, yet the terms ‘spin-­off,’ ‘fall-­out,’ and ‘by-­product,’ imply that the transfer of space-­related

FIGURE 1.11. Peter

Murray and Geoffrey Smyth, cover, Clip-­Kit: Studies in Environmental Design, 1966. Copyright Peter Murray Collection of Avery Library, Columbia University.

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ideas is somehow automatic or accidental. New ideas always need champions who are willing to risk trying to do something better.”131 Rather than an inevitable process of diffusion, transfer was understood as an act of will and imagination, a displacement and recombination of materials and ideas in ways other than initially intended. As Charles Kimball, a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on Applied Science and Technological Progress, wrote at the time, “Technology transfer is perhaps most significant at the level at which cumulative small bits of new information are recombined and put to new uses.”132 The capacity to physically transfer and reconfigure components, processes, or materials was increasingly seen to depend on the circulation and recombination of information. “Clipping” gave an air of effortlessness to the construction of such “structures,” yet the movement of ideas, images, forms, documents, concepts was not immaterial but depended on particular cultural techniques and media apparatuses. Murray and Smyth printed Clip-­Kit on retail offset lithographic presses, facilities that made the assembly, reproduction, and circulation of images and texts far more accessible than it had been for architects even a decade earlier. Murray and Smyth did not photograph the objects in Clip-­Kit; rather, they extracted materials from magazines, catalogs, advertisements, and news articles, reconfiguring, captioning, and labeling them on pasteups. An image assembled from parts of other images, the pages of Clip-­Kit were often degraded to the point of illegibility. Yet unlike the degraded new brutalist image, it was not the resemblances solicited by raw particulate material that were prized. Nor was this a slickly unified and subliminally charged tool of persuasion, the “image” that McHale argued had “taken a beating” by the late 1950s.133 Rather, such images appeared as the result of distinctly individual appropriations and usages, informal yet no longer about raw materiality, prefabricated yet not predetermined. Transfer lettering and typewriter text became an integral part of such an image, keeping the reader from tumbling into an abyss of enlarged particles. Text made the barely discernible outlines of equipment legible as a “pneumatic satellite arrester—­NASA,” and the perplexing granular lump below it into a “transporter developed at Cardington that allows one man to push 10-­ton truck.” The assembly of the hovercraft, the blow-­up seat, the satellite arrester, the zodiac, and the airplane wing came together to make disparate devices into a composite technical image, one that screened the semantic void of “technology” to reveal the unforeseen potentials of an emerging domain. In assembling new relationships between such degraded visual particles, Clip-­Kit hoped to make them legible to the architectural imaginary. The process of obtaining and circulating information 70 CLIPPING

FIGURE 1.12. Peter Murray and Geoffrey Smyth, Clip-­Kit,

page layouts, 1966. Copyright Peter Murray Collection of Avery Library, Columbia University.

about disparate, lateral areas of research became its own center of interest. The deskilled handling evident in Murray and Smyth’s Clip-­Kit was no longer about craft or about manual training but about the work of searching, filtering, and formatting the expanded technocultural continuum so as to envision its reassembly. Such an operation was one in which Banham’s call for a “mental accommodation to technology” became its own kind of image business. In was in this sense that clipping was never solely a theory of attachment but hinged on the transformations implicit in the promiscuous transfer of knowledge and techniques from one domain to another. In the mode of assembly defined by traditions of elemental composition, the elements were “ce qu’on sait,” an architecture assembled from the time-­honored components of building. The charisma of the clip-­on concept, by contrast, lay in the degree to which the unknown, in the form of unfamiliar materials, objects, information, ideas, and concepts, each belonging to entirely different industries and systems of production, might become the elements of architecture. Such transfers did not so much specify as invite the reader to imagine the possible architectural relationships these components might take on. Yet something of the converse was also true. To clip was to form a connection that depended on disconnection. To remove an object from its context meant breaking up its meanings and functions, such that it might be reassembled otherwise. If clip-­on architecture was both magnetic and polarizing in the mid-­1960s, this was because within each transfer opera­tion lay a potential redefinition of what counted as architecture.

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2

THE INFAMOUS PLUG Archigram’s Screen Architecture

The infamous plug. Plug-­in is a term that has consistently been misunderstood as a description of architectural style. Plugging-­in, however, describes an attitude, not a style, a way of thinking that shows a shift of interest from building to the device. A shift from aesthetics to the way portable hardware restructures our behavior. —­David Greene, “Video Notebook”

In 1972 David Greene lamented that Archigram’s most successful concept had also been the most prone to confusion. Plug-­in architecture, he stressed, had looked to understand the profound restructuring of conduct and mind-­set arising from portable receivers, projectors, recording devices, and telecommunications during the previous decade.1 Yet this effort to turn architectural culture’s attention toward devices rather than buildings had been quickly assimilated as another architectural style. Implicit in Greene’s comment was that the plug-­in concept marked a turn away not only from buildings but from the type of visibility associated with machines and mechanisms. The emphasis on portable hardware and its networks troubled the capacity to visualize architecture as something assembled from kits of interchangeable parts, advanced plastics technologies, or clip-­on components, of the type examined in the last chapter. Greene’s comments about the plug-­in concept reflect an intensified interest in the subject’s relation to audiovisual telecommunication networks, which increasingly overtook the group’s interest in physical connections as the decade wore on. The recurring concern for electronics, multiscreen films, slide projections, television broadcasts, satellite communications, and information exchange among members of the group represented a shift in terms of media compared with the advertisements, science 73

fiction magazines, photographs, and tear sheets collected and theorized by members of the Independent Group. Such a reorientation was echoed by a shift in mode, from a poetics informed by the material juxtapositions of collage to one attuned to the control of photomechanical images appearing and disappearing in time, to filmic sequences and optical interpenetrations, qualities closely aligned with techniques of montage. Emblematic of such a turn was the group’s changed perception of the printed page. Archigram is often thought of as a group that published a maga­ zine. Yet it is perhaps more accurate to say that Archigram was a name given to pieces of paper in the early 1960s, out of which a group of architects and an office eventually came to form. Launched as a slim missive in 1961, Archigram initially aimed to collect and disseminate work by its editors, Peter Cook, Greene, and Michael Webb, as well as that of friends and colleagues, mostly recent architecture school graduates living in London. As the title indicated, the aim was to infuse architectural publishing with the urgency and brevity of telegraphy, linking the circulation of paper to some of the earliest forms of electrical telecommunication.2 Over the next two years, Cook, Greene, and Webb were joined by Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, and Ron Herron—­ who were working for the London County Council—­forming the core of the group.3 The group’s thinking about the role of the paper substrate in its practice shifted as the issues accumulated, prompting a more intensive reflection on its place in a larger media ecology. Archigram’s seventh issue, published at the end of 1966, was pivotal in this regard. Its unbound sheets were delivered in a plastic sleeve. Like the pages of Clip-­Kit, which may have inspired this change of format, the magazine became an unfixed and indeterminate kit of informational parts to be unfolded, arranged, and reassembled at will by the reader. Its “cover,” if one can still speak of a cover, carried an image of a computer circuit, and each sleeve included a small electronic resistor. A brief text in the issue made a more explicit declaration about such electronic technology: “The printed page is no longer enough: Ideas and situations now involve movement and sequences that need film, colour, magnification, and explanation in length: magazines will dissolve into a hybrid network of all media at once.”4 Archigram’s thumbnail account of architecture’s changing relationship to media—­in which the static qualities of the page were to dissolve into the kinetic movement of audiovisual signals—­was not offered as a theory but as promotion. The words were printed as a mail-­in reader-­response card of the kind found in the comic books and mass culture magazines that the group prized. The “hybrid network of all media at once” was dubbed the “Archigram network” and proposed to offer readers filmstrips of varying lengths, tapes 74 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

of lectures, “archifilms,” packets of 35 mm slides, and projectable versions of “any item in Archigram if clearly described.”5 Such a changed attitude to printed matter echoed the epochal division between printed and electronic communications that a theorist like Marshall McLuhan had popularized during the 1960s. Technologies such as television, video, and satellite communication, he argued, were both a rupture with the era defined by print and the advent of an “implosive” media ecology that would absorb and reassemble older media forms into a new whole. The group’s sense of the page’s limi­ tations also marked a different vision of what it meant to publish. Archigram no longer referred to a set of printed pages but to an assemblage of media—­ from printed paper to 35 mm slides, film, and magnetic tape—­a mutable set of formats and potential relationships that transmitted the group’s activities across an expanding worldwide network of readers and viewers. The thin, striped, ceramic resistor included with issue 7 underscored this shift. It was a component found inside miniaturized radios, televisions, record players, slide projectors, film cameras, and tape recorders, precisely the kind of portable hardware that interested Greene and his colleagues. It was also the type of thing that could be cheaply purchased from secondhand, military surplus electronics supply shops on London’s Tottenham Court Road.6 If the universal joint of the space frame had symbolized the postwar mechanical environment a decade earlier, the resistor exerted a similar kind of attraction for Archigram. Archigram’s assertion that “the printed page is no longer enough” has been interpreted by Simon Sadler as heralding the decline of buildings in Archigram’s later work, and by Hadas Steiner as foreshadowing the “utter dissolution of architectural interventions” in the ensuing years.7 Yet the dissolution characteristic of Archigram’s discourse might be seen as something other than melting, dematerialization, and break down. Rather than leave architecture behind, it signaled an effort to expand and redefine the group’s modes of intervention. The insufficiency of the page was seized as an opportunity to redefine architecture in terms of new possibilities for extension. The presumed plenitude of the “electronic age” was constructed from the deficiencies of printed paper. The space of the electronic network appeared as a “mental environment” whose outlines were vague yet buzzing with the kinetic possibilities associated with new kinds of audiovisual transmission. The “hybrid network of all media at once” would remedy a deficient page by absorbing and extending it. Archigram understood itself to be confronting a condition that had fundamentally changed, yet the prosthetic logic of its argument had been around for a while. As Mark Wigley has observed, figures as different as Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, R. Buckminster Fuller, 75 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.1. Archigram, “The

Archigram Network,” unbound page, Archigram 7, 1966. Featuring axonometric view of Maxx Project by Yale School of Architecture students Arthur Golding, Craig Hodgetts, and Doug Michels. Offset lithographic print. Copyright Archigram.

and Constantinos Doxiadis all made prostheses central to their theories of modern architecture.8 Yet the prosthetic topos that resurfaces in Archigram’s plug-­in concept was also marked by a twist. Rather than a limb added to a body, or a device extending an organ, the dynamic concerned the extension of one medium into another and a corresponding enlargement of consciousness into a new spatial condition. The logic of extensive reassembly invoked by the group had seemingly shed any need for mechanical attachments or clips, seizing the shift from printed page to electronic network in order to envision an architecture attuned to the increasingly invisible movement of information, affect, and images. The absence of any kind of staple in Archigram 7 became a potent, if ambiguous, signifier. This chapter revisits Archigram’s montages on pages, and in exhibitions, interiors, and competition entries, in light of the media imperative enun­ ciated above. It looks to recover the difference between the clip-on discourse examined in the last chapter and the logic of connectivity and problematics of assembly associated with Archigram’s plug-­in concept. Reyner Banham had tended to downplay the difference between the clip-­on and plug-­in concepts, arguing that they were “often intimately fused in a single project, and the aesthetic tradition overruns niceties of mechanical discrimination. The [plug-­in] aesthetic is still the Clip-­On Aesthetic.”9 Shifting away from the persistent association of the plug-­in concept with images of megastructures, most infamously the group’s Plug-­In City study, the chapter highlights a different plug-­in logic, one found more readily in the group’s work with the devices and hardware noted by Greene (Plate 2). The limitations of the page singled out in issue 7 pointed to forces of media competition, the sense that a world of drawings, ink, and staples was being absorbed into one of electromagnetic tapes, projections, and video. Such a confrontation implied that the primary medium for visualization and transmission would move from pages to screens. Archigram’s intensive effort to fuse drawing conventions with an expanded repertoire of montage techniques served to envision an architecture of environmental screens, a central, yet largely overlooked, preoccupation. Beginning with the proto screen enclosure of the group’s first exhibition, Living City, in 1963, an increasingly complex screen architecture evolved through proposals for living capsules, public feedback environments, mobile projection and transmission systems, and a winning competition entry for an entertainment center in Monte Carlo. Envisioning such electronic screen spaces mobilized techniques that combined multiple photographs and different types of printed matter, as well as drawings, screen tone, transfer lettering, kinetic models, light machines, filmstrips, slide carousels, and electrical 78 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

switches. The group’s claims about the hybrid network of media cannot be taken at face value: at stake is less a wholesale jump from print to electronics than a complex entanglement of filmic media, electronics, paper, and printing. The “hybrid network of all media at once” was envisioned on paper and remained a system coordinated by mail. The majority of the images moving across such screens were print media reprojected and arranged into different sequences. This sense of transfer and translation, rather than rupture, can also be thought in the other direction, enabling one to ask how the habits, disciplines, and techniques associated with paper come to be transformed as they are absorbed into operations associated with other media forms. In this sense, Archigram’s screen architecture might be thought not only in relation to established multiscreen practices of this period, such as Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis’s Philips Pavilion in Brussels (1958), Eero Saarinen and the Eameses’ IBM pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1964), and Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-­Drome (1965). Archigram’s screens should be understood not as autonomous, optical surfaces but as elements of an emergent screen assemblage that aimed to consolidate, transmit, filter, and catalyze a changeable flow of information, energy, and images by plugging itself into the aging infrastructure of Great Britain at this moment. This emerging screen architecture was envisioned in the form of ephemeral audiovisual events, “instant cities,” and mobile, networked, audiovisual educational systems by relying on particular cultural techniques and practices. Devices for envisioning a new media landscape, and for appropriating a range of audio­ visual and transmission technologies, they also can be interpreted as fragile shields, protective devices erected amid the anxieties and fears associated with the invisible power of electronic media.

Living City Archigram’s Living City exhibition opened at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the beginning of June 1963. A complex enclosure installed in the members gallery, it was composed of triangular frames in nine standard sizes built from welded cable conduiting that could be combined to create an irregular structure filled in with solid panels. The goal, an early press release by Cook explained, was to “condition” spectators by cutting them off from “the everyday situation, where things are seen in predictable and accepted relationships.”10 The interior was completely covered with a dense montage of photographic material. Continuous graphic clusters created out of enlargements from the group’s clipping files, surplus urban 79 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

advertisements obtained from the city’s billposters, and adhesive lettering and reflective metallic paper were used to graphically divide the interior into seven areas dubbed “gloops.”11 For this reason, it has frequently been compared to Independent Group exhibitions of the 1950s that popularized the use of photographic enlargements in suspended arrays, such as A Parallel of Life and Art (1953) or This Is Tomorrow (1956).12 The comparison is apt, yet brings to light a significant difference. The suspended enlargements used in such exhibitions never merged physically, whereas Living City insisted on just that. The graphic logic was distinct from the geometry of the underlying panels and spilled across their edges, complicating perception of the underlying structure. The effect drew as much from the page layouts of Archigram as it did from IG exhibitions. Archigram 1 consisted of two sheets. The first was an off-­kilter mixture of hand-­lettered sentences and typewritten text reproduced on a Gestetner FIGURE 2.2.

Archigram, installation view, Living City exhibition, 1963. Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Copyright Archigram.

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office duplicator, embellished with a spot of red printed by means of a potato. This sheet was stapled to a larger sheet printed by retail offset lithography, a motley group of photographs and drawings of work by Cook, Greene, Webb, as well as a host of friends. The materials were laid out in a shallow plane seen from above, cutout materials arranged freely, yet kept scrupulously sepa­rate, to avoid any superimposition or resuturing. The layout was reminiscent of pages from Edward Wright’s catalogue for This Is Tomorrow, which had also been printed using offset lithography and was, according to Herron, “a much prized possession.”13 Juxtaposing projects for a seaside development, a concert hall, a cinema, an office, and a mosque, the issue searched for a loose type of continuity, as much between people as between different types of curved form, a predilection that turned against the “decaying Bauhaus image,” curtain walls, and “graph paper,” a charged cultural technology whose prevalence had made it into a synecdoche for a nineteenth-­century discourse of elemental composition.14 The third issue, produced contemporaneously with the Living City exhibition, reveals a significant formal and conceptual shift. The group no longer sought to assemble formal affinities in projects by the editors and their friends, or to represent a new generation.15 Rather, the issue turned to a particular question facing contemporary architecture. Picking up the concern for expendability raised in the 1950s by members of the Independent

FIGURE 2.3.

Archigram, plan, Living City exhibition, 1963. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Ink on tracing paper. Copyright Archigram.

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FIGURE 2.4. Peter Cook and David Greene, broadsheet from Archigram 1. Offset lithography. Copyright Archigram.

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Group (IG), the issue was assembled from projects and objects cut from the pages of other magazines, journals, reports, and books. Archigram 3 no longer treated images like discrete objects but as photomechanical fragments that coalesced into composite clusters. On a typical page, a landscape of “abstracta” system domes was combined with Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion car, insulated plastic panels for Antarctic survey stations, disposable soap powder packages, telephone exchange cabins, Wonderloaf bread, frozen peas, Coca-­ Cola, and instant coffee. Here the consistency of the page depended less on the spaces between things than on the places where they joined. The scale of each clipped element was subtly adjusted to enhance the effect. Between the prefabricated panel and the soap package, the plastic cabin and the box of puffed wheat, diminutive human figures were carefully preserved. Dwarfed

by outsize packaging, these building workers can be seen as stand-­ins for the architects montaging visual fragments on their drawing boards, simultaneously agents of assembly and part of the image field. Words no longer followed the edges of clipping fragments; instead, oversized transfer lettering was applied over the image, declaring: “It’s all the same.” The leveling declaration took the horizontal, dehierarchized conception of the cultural continuum that had emerged in IG discussions and flattened it some more.16 Archigram 3 and the ICA exhibition had sought to link the aesthetics of expendability more directly to debates over the role of architecture and planning in the postwar city, at the very moment that the group was working under Theo Crosby for an urban redevelopment project at London’s Euston Station.17 The flattened continuity characteristic of Archigram’s expendable graphic clusters did not aim to represent the city; instead, it served as an ana­ logue for qualities—­clustering, density, and flexibility—­that also guided the planning work at Euston.18 “In the living city,” the catalog noted, “all are important: the triviality of lighting a cigarette, or the hard fact of moving two million commuters a day. In fact they are equal—­as facets of the shared experience of the city.”19 Yet “It’s all the same” can also be read as an extension of the logic of the paste-­up, in which there was no longer any essential difference between things glued to a surface. Here distinctions were to be produced, or effaced, by virtue of different arrangements.

FIGURE 2.5. Illustrated double page from This Is Tomorrow exhibition catalog, Whitechapel Gallery, 1956. “The Head for Man Himself—­ His Brain and His Machines,” by Group Six. Digital image from Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Copyright Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

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FIGURE 2.6. “It’s All

the Same,” page 6 from Archigram 3, 1963. Archigram with Peter Taylor. Offset lithographic print. Copyright Archigram.

No longer a series of layered elements suspended within a horizontal, dehierarchized field, the dense combination of printed matter that made up the interior of Living City might be seen as a verticalization of such pasteups. Remainders from London’s hoardings were treated like elements glued to cardboard, while material from the group’s own clipping files were enlarged to the scale of a wall, a dense and cacophonous conflation of the street and the drafting board. The resulting interior was at once graphically and epistemologically flat yet physically faceted: a surface where objects, words, patterns, and bodies bulged outward or collapsed inward. A playful yet violent cutting, one that obliterated the orthogonality characteristic of the photographic print, was used to produce the continuous graphic clusters that defined the interior of Living City. The irregularly shaped, polymorphous edges that resulted from such cutting were resutured into a multidirectional photomechanical pattern linked by conceptual associations. In the section of Living City devoted to “situation,” the circular silhouette of a geodesic dome was conjoined to lunette views of several street scenes, a photograph of the Empire State Building shrouded in fog, a fish-­eye view of curving balconies, Milan’s galleria, and a fragment from Guy Debord’s 1957 psychogeographic map of Paris.20 While the inclusion of Debord’s infamous collage map may have been meant to signal an affinity with situationism, it actually highlighted a key difference between their methods of cutting. Debord took apart a tourist map of Paris in order to break up the idealized homogeneity that cartographic representation imposed on urban space. Dominated by the negative space produced by eliminated sections of the map, Debord’s Paris was repopu­ lated by arrows, indicators of a psychogeographic attraction that depended on redaction. Archigram’s cuts did not allow such blank spaces; rather, they continuously resutured images in multiple directions, swamping the field of vision with a hybrid continuity that splayed across the physical limits of any given panel. However much Living City depended on techniques for transferring and reproducing photographs in print, the interior was no longer understood in terms of the map, the page, or the photograph but in terms of a film screen. “The exhibition,” they wrote, “pre­sents evocations, accentuations and simulations of city life, not a display of suggested forms. The image is a total image of it all, like a film.”21 Film, more than still photography or the printed page, had the capacity to assimilate movement, shifting viewpoints, and a multiplicity of references into a single entity.22 Living City articulated an analogy that compared a complex structural geometry and printed paper to an immersive screen space. Yet with filmic montage the diversity of recombined material is experienced in 85 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.7. Guy

Debord, Guide psychogéographique de Paris: Discours sur les passions de l’amour: pentes psychogeographiques de la dérive et localisation d’unités d’ambiance, 1957. Copyright Alice Debord.

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sequence, while at Living City the spectator was confronted with a spatialized simultaneity, one whose faceted continuity was distinct from the emphasis on layering examined in the previous chapter. While Archigram explicitly likened its interior to film, there were no moving images projected within Living City. The interior was, however, animated by a different kind of flickering light and sound. The light effects were produced from several sources. One was a “Flicker Machine,” an improvised version of one of the Dream Machines conceived by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville at this moment. Another was  spotlights that turned on and off within the interior in an automated pattern. Little of these qualities can be gleaned from the surviving exhibition photographs, yet something of their effect was registered in reviews. The most dramatic of these appeared in the conservative gossip paper the Tatler.

Stumbling, as if in a nightmare, I found myself apologizing for barging into two other visitors who turned out to be a naked shop-­ window dummy, suspended by her head . . . and a five-­foot bottle of tomato ketchup. A six-­foot tall spaceman with the head of Diane Cilento grinned at me from a photograph, a tape recorder enveloped me in the roar of traffic, the screech of brakes and the grrrr of bad gear changing, a revolving searchlight hit me in the eyes 10 times every second. At any moment, I expected to be run down by a berserk bus.23

The vividly hyperbolic description conveyed an illusory sense of movement and a complex recorded urban soundscape. But there was no tape recorder at Living City. The only audio came from radios in the bar tuned to various stations.24 What the critic described as “bad gear changing” was, in all likelihood, the noise of a Perspex switch mounted within a kinetic model constructed from a triangulated wire frame and printed paper. Built by Dennis Crompton, the City Synthesizer, as it was called, was at once intricate and crude: a moving object that channeled a period dream of cybernetic control, a vision in which electronic computers were to help solve the complex planning problems of rapid urban growth.25 It was also a literal control mechanism. The pattern of plastic cogs on the electric switch housed in the model was connected to a circuit just outside the enclosure and regulated the flow of electricity, triggering the on-­off pattern of the spotlights in the interior. Like the resistor included in Archigram 7, Crompton obtained the switch from an electronics surplus shop on the Tottenham Court Road.26 It was the type of switch that British Telecom began removing from telephone exchanges in the early 1960s, in order to install a newer generation of automated, electronic switches in their place.27 The switch can be seen as a media relic, pointing to the wider technological and infrastructural transition taking place in the early 1960s. The workings of an electrical switch was necessary for such a combination of structural frames and photomechanical surfaces to emerge as a screen; assembly here concerned something more and other than the mechanical qualities of joints and connectors: it had to connect, automate, and regulate the pulse of electrical signals across power sources, programming devices, cables, circuit boards, and bulbs. The screens of Living City were simultaneously immersive technologies of display and barriers to vision, screening out the surroundings together with the mechanisms that enabled these paper surfaces to function as media screens.

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FIGURE 2.8.

Archigram, installation view, Living City exhibition, 1963. Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Copyright Archigram.

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On the verge of fleeing from this “nightmare,” the critic described a glinting image that captured his attention, a “shining metal tunnel at the remote far end of which everyday life was going on as usual. It was a magic window onto the outside world through which one could look with godlike detachment.”28 The “magic window” was one of two periscopes that extended from the exhibition’s interior through the ICA’s windows, their glass screens delivering up images of cars and pedestrians on Dover Street. The critic’s hyperbole meant

FIGURE 2.9. Dennis Crompton, City Synthesizer,” 1963. Photograph of kinetic model included in Living City. Copyright Archigram.

FIGURE 2.10. Exterior view of Living City exhibition, 1963. The circuit board (connected to the kinetic model) is visible at bottom left just outside the structure. Copyright Archigram.

to disparage, yet it also highlighted that the emergent screen was not one but formed in a tension between two distinct modalities. On the one hand, the montage of photomechanical materials, light, and sound was an unframed, immersive, all-­encompassing screen confounding the spectator’s ability to delimit and compartmentalize sense impressions. On the other, the screen appeared as a diminutive framed surface. In contrast to the enclosure, the “magic window” extended vision while protecting one from being seen, a voyeuristic aid to scopic mastery described as “godlike.” These two modalities of screening that emerge at Living City mark a different relation between interior and exterior, one that no longer corresponded to the physical boundary of the exhibition surface. The difference between inside and outside had come to depend, on the one hand, on a capacity to regulate electric signals and, on the other, on the tension between two dissimilar screen experiences: an immersive surround and a prosthetic extension.29

Environmental Kinetics In the wake of Living City, the group increasingly designed projects with screens, and screens in turn became more and more central to its vision of architecture in an electronic age. Such projects, moreover, were increasingly described not as buildings, or architecture, but as “assemblies.”30 Such assemblies denoted the coming together of a kit of physical components with an array of media devices and systems, a loose gathering of enclosures, partitions, screens, robots, pads, projectors, and processing and support elements not unlike the unbound collection of items printed in the magazine. The Plug-­In City study, and its related projects, was the earliest to be described as an “assembly.”31 The project is most often remembered as an image of expendable, small-­scale dwelling units attached to durable service cores. The proto-­electronic shift from “clip” to “plug” manifests itself in the blurred boundary between structural attachment and electrical connectivity. Indeed, these structural towers were envisioned as infrastructural conduits, providing access to water, air, electricity, audiovisual media, as well as goods transportation. The relationship of plug-­in “capsule” to tower was thus intimately connected to a different way of living with electronic media, a condition that becomes palpable in the interiors of the project’s capsules. Perhaps the most detailed effort to envision the interior life of a plug-­in unit was Cook’s “Plug ’n’ Clip dwelling,” which began as a project in the advanced studies unit at the Hornsey College of Art and was produced with Crompton in mock-­up form for an exhibit at Woolands department store in 1965. As Cook elabo90 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

rated in a related text on the future of the interior, the minimal footprint of such plug-­in capsules demanded a reconceptualization of the room, which needed to “adapt for several requirements or atmospheres.”32 The capsule’s interior was to have no furniture in a traditional sense; rather, it was defined by a combination of built-­in, multifunctional features and advanced audiovisual media systems.33 In Cook’s text the capsule’s adaptability emphasized media switching more than it did physical reconfigurability. Interior spaces were transformed by audiovisual devices plugged into reconfigurable “media towers,” whose logic mirrored the compact, interchangeable dwelling units plugged into vertical service towers. As Cook explained: The edge of the TV screen is not the limit of a changing environment. All the colors of the spectrum are now within our grasp, and colour can be projected. We can reproduce images of yesterday by photograph or film, and the slide show has taken the place of the family album. It is only an extension of all these to conceive of a living room that could be simulated by color, sound, or projected images, any atmosphere required simply by throwing a switch.34

Switching as a deskilled form of technical control met with an enhanced capacity for effecting instantaneous environmental transformation. Like Banham’s contemporaneous fascination with the Gizmo, powerful machinery was not only miniaturized but controlled at the press of a button.35 If the advent of more and more portable media hardware in the 1960s had made such an experience more common, Cook’s description still remained closer to fantasy than actuality. In this sense, his description bore less relation to the actual tower that Crompton mocked up for the installation than to the immersive “total image” that the group had sought to produce at Living City.36 Such an immersive surrounding was presented again in opposition to the delimited frame of the television screen. Here a desire for intermedial convergence and consolidation manifested itself in the form of a rudimentary assemblage of audio-visual machines, anticipating the “hybrid network of all media at once.” The plug-­in dwelling’s smooth and continuous bare walls were surfaces ready to become screens, prepared to receive projected light that carried not only television images but information, colors, atmospheric effects, memories, and family photos, all called up by the lightest of touches. A number of Archigram projects from the second half of the 1960s testify to an increasingly elaborate effort to envision new relationships between portable media hardware and flexible building systems. Webb’s Cushicle project 91 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.11. Plan and section, Plug ’N’ Clip Room for the Sunday Times’ Three Spaces exhibition held at Woolands department store, Knightsbridge, London, 1965. Ink on tracing paper. Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton. Copyright Archigram.

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(1966) envisioned a portable, telescopic armature that opened out into an inflatable double-­skin membrane that was to serve as a defensive filter against the environment and as a projection screen.37 As audiovisual screens began to appear no longer as delimited planes of appearance but as encompassing, protective membranes and as extensions of human touch, the capacity to switch and select from different media channels blurred into a progressively larger idea of environmental determination. The Living 1990 exhibition at the Harrods department store in 1967, sponsored by London’s Weekend Telegraph, presented a prototype future dwelling, much like the Smithsons’ House of the Future (1956) had done a decade earlier. Unlike the kit of interchangeable panels that Banham so admired in the Smithsons’ project, Archigram made no effort to define the nature of the enclosure. What was offered was no longer a house but a “living area,” a “transient pad” in which “the passing moment’s assembly became the environment.”38 The configuration was defined by “small-­scale plug-­in systems,” among which were two remote-­controlled robots that consolidated the functions of a movable partition with that of a media machine capable of dividing a horizontal continuum into various flexible “zones” while serving as multimedia surfaces for “films, screened happenings, television, color, light.”39 The exhibition Beyond Architecture at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art (1967) deployed eight automated slide carousels and eight screens to create an immersive, randomized montage of 640 images, including drawings by members of the group

and material from their photographic and clippings collections. No inventory of the slides exhibited at Oxford was preserved, but a sense of the exhibition’s images can be gleaned from the poster, which featured suitcase satellite receivers, ready-­made bathrooms, military transport helicopters, inflatable airplane wings, tensegrity structures, electronic circuit diagrams, and the vertical rocket transporter at Cape Canaveral Space Center. The perceptual skills needed to make sense of randomly interacting projections were presented as the mental qualities associated with technological transfer, for comprehending “forces outside architecture that could be encompassed to widen its scope.”40 The Soft Scene Monitor project realized the following year for an exhibition in Oslo in 1968, pursued this goal further, through a more compact apparatus that surrounded visitors with a bank of projection screens, and aimed to give them a rudimentary degree of control over the channels. At the Milan Trienniale that year, the group presented a sixty-­foot-­long inflatable with drawings, models, neon tubes, and photographs, all overlaid with slide and film projections on a twelve-­minute loop.41 Greene’s Logplug and Rokplug projects (1968–­69) envisioned audiovisual infrastructural connections embedded in artificial logs in parks and other bucolic settings, waiting to receive small portable screens that people carried with them. Across this range of projects, screens play a more active role, yet their capacity to mark an inside–­ outside boundary was less and less clear. Furthermore, not only their content but increasingly their function and position were to be determined by the user, rather than the architect. Such dynamics came to the fore in the group’s Control and Choice project, an architectural vision of how one might extend the latent capacities of audio­visual media over fixed architectural hardware. Exhibited at Paris’s Biennial des Jeunes in 1967, it took the form of a model and set of drawings that envisioned a flexible, media-­serviced “carcass.”42 The project was also described as an “assembly” composed of “a conglomeration of systems, organizations, and technical apparatus

FIGURE 2.12.

Cushicle, elevations/ sections, sequence from armature to expanded enclosure, 1966. Michael Webb. Photomontage as reproduced in “The Ultimate in Drive-­in Living,” Architectural Design, November 1966. Copyright Archigram.

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FIGURE 2.13. Plan,

Living 1990 exhibit for the Weekend Telegraph constructed in Harrods department store, London, 1967. Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, and Ron Herron. Copyright Archigram.

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that permit the choice of one response out of a number of different alternatives.”43 The most fixed elements of the carcass were vertical industrial pylons spanned by a variable “Floor/Wall/Truss/substructure kit” wired with plug-­in points for electronic connection, water, and air supply at one-­meter intervals.44 These horizontal surfaces were skirted by electrical vehicle tracks and were to be defined by temporary inflatable enclosures and “robotized elements” carrying “the ephemeral end of the environment: screened happenings, television, colour, light.”45 Ephemeral media screens were the terminal points of a larger and less visible system of environmental control. “The Control and Choice discussion,” Cook noted the following year, “revolved around the potential of unseen microswitches and sensors, but more than this; these devices would need the intelligence of a computed relay of in-

FIGURE 2.14.

“Archigram Group—­ Beyond Architecture,” 1967. Exhibition poster for the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Copyright Archigram.

formation so that they came into service at the moment when you needed them.”46 The management of the environment was again equated with control over switches: “The determination of your environment need no longer be left in the hands of the designer of the building: it can be turned over to you yourself. You turn the switches and choose the conditions to sustain you at that point in time.”47 As control comes to be figured in terms of an expansive power to organize and direct systems of indeterminate environmental projections, familiar architectural conventions come to be troubled. Herron’s section drawings conveyed a sense of the carcass as a support for the variable assembly of fixed and mobile elements by collaging multiple copies of the same elements—­ trusses, robots, and inflatable units—­in different positions. Other members of the group emphasized the project’s audiovisual systems. Crompton noted how the activation of media devices such as hi-­fi stereo equipment, slide carou­sels, or home movie projectors meant that rooms were no longer primarily defined by doors, windows, or furniture but by the configuration of screens, light beams, amplified sound, and projected images.48 “The implication,” he noted, was “clear”: The control over the environmental conditions being experienced by the observer is no longer in the hands of the designer of the 95 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

building, it has been transferred to the observer. The person who controls the switch can choose the conditions which he finds most capable of providing the sustenance required at the time. The building is reduced to a carcass, which may either permit or actually restrain the activities.49

FIGURE 2.15. Partial

elevation/section, Control and Choice Dwelling, 1967. Ron Herron and Warren Chalk. Print from collage of original ink-­line drawings on tracing paper. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

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The implications of such portable audiovisual hardware lead to what Crompton called a “Flip Point”: one that called for a thorough redefinition of the architect’s task. “To understand the full relevance of the research into media techniques,” he wrote, “it is essential to re-­examine the function of the architect, or rather that of the environmental complexes which he strives to erect.”50 One manifestation of the reexamination called for by Crompton was a more direct collaboration with artists, technicians, and designers interested in making and programming audio-visual environments. This took the form of a key, yet overlooked collaboration between members of Archigram and the Light/Sound Workshop at the Hornsey College of Art. Founded by the industrial designer Clive Latimer as part of the Advanced Studies Program at Hornsey, Crompton and Cook were engaged with the workshop from roughly 1965 until 1968.51 In addition to these three, the workshop included

the painter John Bowstead, as well as Mike Leonard, who had developed light machines for Pink Floyd and for the television program Top of the Pops.52 The roster of postgraduate students and instructors included Tony Rickaby, Janet Spiller, Roger Jeffs, Ivor Smith, and James Meller, among others. Workshop projects were done collaboratively and not for credit, and the emphasis on light and sound, rather than more traditional medium-­based categories—­ such as painting, sculpture, or photography—­cut against the college’s departmental structure.53 The workshop mobilized the resources of the industrial design department to create physical machines that could project and modu­ late light, and sought new modes of synchronization and control for these devices. In this sense, the Light/Sound Workshop was in tune both with period phenomena like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) and with contemporaneous music clubs like those emerging in Covent Garden, at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, and farther afield, like the Piper clubs in Italy at this moment. As a pedagogical experiment, the Light/Sound Workshop was also different from these fixed, if flexibly reconfigurable, venues and traveling events; its goal was to codify and refine techniques for “creating environments on a very large scale.”54 Such a project was advanced under a rubric of “environmental kinetics.”55 In a 1967 interview, Latimer confidently predicted that “the applications of these techniques are boundless. Ballet and theater have already adopted them on a fairly large scale, and primitive versions can be recognized in the neon advertising we see around us each day. Their total integration with architecture, especially as far as the design and decoration of interiors is concerned, is practically inevitable, and may eventually expand to projects involving whole towns.”56 The workshop both built its own manually operated devices for projecting discontinuous image montages and devised ways to combine existing devices into new assemblages.57 Kodak carousel slide projectors, which came on the market in the early 1960s, were quickly incorporated and combined with overhead and 8 mm film projectors. Such early experiments began in an ad hoc fashion by borrowing projectors from lecture halls in the evenings at various universities. Surviving photographs of events held at Portsmouth and in Birmingham around 1965–­66 provide little information about the technical apparatus, but convey a vivid sense of the projections, which appear as densely superimposed fields of 35 mm slides, colored gels, stencils, and 8 mm film reels (Plate 10). The mode was immersive, creating a layered optical and acoustic field that violated the frame of the image and aimed to break down the boundaries between media and disciplines. Here the immersive field no longer required the paper-­based montage screens assembled for 97 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.16. Tony Rickaby, poster for Light/Sound Workshop, Hornsey College of Art, London, 1968. Copyright and courtesy Tony Rickaby.

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Living City, nor was there any effort to construct an enclosure; complex optical superimposition was sufficient to turn the ordinary walls of auditoriums and the bodies of the participants into virtual screens. The Light/Sound Workshop realized its largest demonstration of environmental kinetics on Brighton’s West Pier as part of the inaugural Brighton Festival in April 1967. The monthlong project—­dubbed K4: Kinetic Audio Visual Environments—­included a “labyrinth” in the pier’s main pavilion, which housed an international exhibition of works of kinetic art and an “arena” in the central pavilion. Long lost, the layout and appearance of K4 must be reconstructed from technical descriptions, photographs, the recollections of participants, and recently rediscovered film footage.58 Footage captured by the Brighton Student Film Society provides some of the only documentation of the labyrinth, which was a dark, irregular set of temporary passageways in which work by kinetic artists—­such as Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, members of the Zero group (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker), as well as British artists David Medalla, Stuart Brisley, and Stephen Willats, were installed along with projects by workshop members. According to Latimer, the labyrinth aimed to create “a more varied and personal experience” with a range of screen types. Yet it also explored something more spatially destabilizing, including a “pitch dark mirrored room where electronic devices cause spectators to trigger off flashing and coloured lights, creating an infinite recession of images,” and a “brilliantly lit panel modified by spectators in another section of the labyrinth moving through beams of light.”59 Elsewhere on the pier was Peter Cook, James Meller, and Peter Sampson’s “Video Drum,” which placed a supine viewer inside a cylinder and subjected the viewer to rotation in 360 degrees while bombarding him or her with amplified sounds

and projected images.60 Above the pier, the workshop team envisioned a range of tethered inflatables, “aerial structures” that were to be programmed with lighting effects.61 Once again, the emergent screen appears not as an independent object or in a single guise. In the dark passages of the labyrinth visitors were thrown into uncertainty, unsure whether they were encountering effects created by their own actions, or those triggered by spectators in other locations. The arena, by contrast, served as a panoramic enclosure for a crowd. Here an illuminated, immersive curtain was drawn around a collective mass, creating a venue for performances by bands such as Pink Floyd and Pyramid, as well as electronic music composed by Unit Delta Plus and Lasry Baschet. More documentary evidence survives regarding the arena, including photographs by Rickaby and 16 mm film footage shot by Crompton. The arena was a “white cylinder projection screen” about sixty feet in diameter and fifty feet tall, “broken by vertical slots” through which the public entered.62 The projection surfaces were mobile scaffolding structures covered in stretched fabric, each of which was equipped with its own loudspeaker. Members of the Light/Sound Workshop operated a battery of their own high-­power projectors from a suspended platform at the center of the arena, which were to “produce a large number of permutations of image and color sequences,” an immersive 360-­degree enclosure for those inside and “a curtain of moving color” for those approaching.63 The surviving film footage provides a vivid, if fragmentary, glimpse of the different types of patterns that were projected. The first portion of the film is dominated by an aerial view of clusters of dancing bodies, whose features are picked out in the glare of spotlights.64 Rapidly pulsing strobe lights reflecting off drum kits and micro­phone stands provide a visual trace of the sonic rhythms that must have engulfed the space. At one moment a banner calling for the end of white-­minority rule in the British colony of Rhodesia flashes up, a fleeting sign that the period’s decolonization struggles penetrated a domain that was otherwise composed of rigorously geometric patterns, rhythms, and flashing lights. Toward the end of the clip, screens appear through a scrim of dancing silhouettes, animated by pulsating washes of color that ripple and shift upward. These patterns were the work of Latimer, Leonard, and Crompton, who created such effects by introducing refractive elements—­prisms, slides, disks, and rods—­between the projector and the focusing lens (Plate 11). Latimer described the patterns generated in such screen environments as virtually limitless, with the goal being to learn to orchestrate and control these “with the precision and range of a modern choreographer.”65 At other moments, different patterns appeared. Toward the beginning, 99 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.17. Light/

Sound Workshop, arena area at K4—­ Kinetic Audio Visual Environments, West Pier, Brighton, 1967. Frame enlargements of a 16 mm film taken by Dennis Crompton. Copyright Archigram.

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a grainy black-­and-­white pattern revolves laterally across a screen surface while bright geometric shapes and text from computer printouts flash on and off in various positions. Similar patterns reappear at the end, as the screens flickered with rapid-­fire sequences of letters, pulsing perforations, abstract icons, and triangulated networks of lines on brightly colored grounds (Plate 12). These were by Bowstead, Martin Salisbury, and Ron Sutherland, who described their work as evoking a “giant video control screen of the future.”66 In each case, the different patterns suggest a fluid form of montage,

yet of two different kinds. With Latimer, Crompton, and Leonard’s work, the screen was defined by the movements of fluid patterns across the projection surface, a movement modulated by lenses, disks, and bodies within the projectors’ beams. Bowstead, Salisbury, and Sutherland articulated a different kind of flow, a movement of information across a great distance as it came to be channeled and screened through an imaginary interface. While the projections were controlled manually from the elevated platform, the Light/ Sound Workshop nonetheless envisioned the arena as a step toward a screen architecture controlled via audience feedback, on the one hand, and plugged into a larger communications network, on the other. As Bowstead speculated: “The physical structures . . . are at the same time screening facilities for a variety of internal and external media channels, the whole being linked by a network of control systems. . . . The programmed area itself might function as an extension of his [the spectator’s] sensory equipment . . . if the area were plugged into external media networks such as television or computer links.”67 Bowstead’s description shifted from Latimer’s invocation of choreography toward a hybrid form of architectural and informational programming, in which “any given area can be programmed both physically in terms of size and character and also in its information bearing capacity.”68

Invisibility and Control Envisioning the network of media systems that might one day be connected to Light/Sound environments like the one designed for Brighton was not an isolated problem. Archigram, as Mark Wigley has argued, was in tune with a larger period attempt to make “poetic images of the invisible communications infrastructure . . . a visible aesthetics for the invisible net.”69 Yet envisioning how such flexible and reconfigurable screens extended into various transmission and feedback networks was often at odds with the inherited codes and capacities of architectural representation. Cook’s effort to visualize the effects of hidden sensors, microswitches, and computer relays in the Control and Choice project highlights the potential for collapse when it came to drawing the invisible. Published in Stephen Willats’s little magazine Control, a journal devoted to discussions about kinetic art, participation, and systems aesthetics in the London art world, the image highlighted a segment of Control and Choice’s movable wall/floor/truss system (Plate 13).70 A range of screens, roll-­up membranes, “place tents,” spokes, and other equipment was placed on an isotropic grid of regularly spaced “plug-­in points.” To articu­ late these elements, Cook turned to a technique the group would use more 101 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

frequently to visualize changeable arrangements—­the overlaying of graphic films and other photomechanical elements on baseline drawings. The lightweight surfaces, responsive audiovisual media, and mobile occupants were no longer in the drawing but, rather, placed temporarily on its surface.71 The axonometric projection used in Cook’s baseline drawing both mimicked and misused a convention that had been subject to graphic standardization in postwar architecture and engineering practice, especially for assembly drawings.72 Such drawings were expected to clearly separate the ele­ments of a component while maintaining the proper relationships between pieces relative to their assembled positions. Cook’s drawing offered only the most schematic sense of positions, confused any sense of hierarchy, and left the nature of the connections to the viewer’s imagination. Where assembly drawings sought to eliminate misinterpretation by removing all unnecessary tonality, gradation, and surface treatments, Cook created at least three variations by applying different textures, colored films, and cutout figures, creating a deliberately noisy effect. Yet Cook’s drawing cannot necessarily be seen as a return to the axonometric projections widely taken up by avant-­garde architects and artists in the interwar years, whose appeal, Yve-­Alain Bois has argued, lay in the potential for radical optical reversibility.73 Cook’s axonometric was decidedly impure, the axonometric projection on the left side of the sheet collapsed directly into a view rendered in single-­point perspective on the right. Just as Control and Choice was a “hybrid” assembly of hardware and software, carcass and screen media, it came to be visualized as a hybrid conjunction of the unfixed and relative viewpoint of axonometry and the more familiar and stable sense of depth characteristic of perspectival projection. Unlike mechanical systems, electronic control systems were largely invisible, and their greater integration with visible systems made the problem of representation especially difficult. As Cook noted: “In a place where the hardware, software, and ephemera are all intermixed (and interdependent at any one time) there has to be a much looser hierarchy of parts. It becomes almost impossible to draw.”74 The near impossibility of drawing the changeable audiovisual interior of Control and Choice went hand in hand with a coming apart of the familiar relationship between screen, audience, darkness, and projector that had served as the dominant cinematic dispositive for most of the century.75 On the one hand, such a breakdown was greeted as potentially emancipatory, heralding a new and “unlimited” atmospheric and projective power at the disposition of the user. On the other, the dispersal and ephemeralization of this power eroded qualities essential to the architect and to the activation of the user. As I showed in chapter 1, for Banham it was precisely 102 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

the ability to see and distinguish the parts of Archigram’s Plug-­In City that might enable a user to intervene in and adapt this type of mechanical environment. Yet, the more completely the architect sought to give users control over the environment, the less they could envision it. In such a condition, the legitimacy of the architect’s authority could no longer be cast in terms of visual control. Invisibility was understood to be one of the defining qualities of electronic, as opposed to mechanical, systems. And it was precisely around the invisibility of electronic communications systems that anxieties about power and control surfaced. Archigram’s promise of control hinged on a user who manipulated a switch, yet the switch was but the terminal end of a larger, unseen network to which neither the architect nor the user had access. The power for control in electronic systems was more frightening precisely because it was unseen. This familiar bogey of the first machine age becomes even more terrifying with the dependence upon the unseen potential of electronic systems (they have even greater power of control than the obvious, symbolic, and almost humanoid presence of the machine). The dependence on such things for an emancipatory life is one of our paradoxes.76

The “paradox” highlights the degree to which the group’s idea of emancipation depended on dreams of control. This vision of control reflected a deep current of liberalism within the group, a structuring thread binding together the increasingly far-­flung contributors.77 Shared in large part with Banham’s writings, the group tended to describe freedom as a form of individual control synonymous with expanded choice. The subject’s capacity to select, assemble, and transport various interchangeable “kits of parts” was central to the group’s discourse of emancipation.78 It was indeed the active connotations of assembly that distinguished such do-­it-­yourself kits from the pseudo-­ differentiation of postwar styling and from the standardized, type objects characteristic of much interwar modernist design thinking. As a project like Control and Choice made physical structure into a residual support for electronic systems, the group’s rhetoric of emancipation came to be increasingly conceptualized in terms of dematerialization. It was in the magazine’s eighth issue in 1968 that the group ventured a definition of emancipation.79 One of a series of key terms, the text of the definition appeared on a loose-­leaf sheet tucked into an envelope and had collaged on 103 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

it two figures wearing head-­mounted prosthetic devices—­Archigram’s Info Gonks (1968), a speculative project for electronic screen eyewear, and Kleiner Raum (1967), a work by the Austrian architect and artist Walter Pichler. The latter consisted of a molded plastic helmet whose interior allowed the wearer access to his or her surroundings only through a perforated screen, and which transmitted the voice electronically through a miniature wired microphone. Archigram’s Info-­Gonks and Pichler’s Kleiner Raum could be read as emblems for the type of emancipation described in the text, which, they insisted, should not be confused with “the amassing of objects” but with a concern for mental freedom.80 Emancipation, the text continued, “represents pretty accurately the direction outwards that our mental environment can reach: to the farthest imaginable limits. This is the crux of the matter: in the past the indulgence of the mind and the intellect (as applied to artefacts) was the privilege of the rich.”81 Such a claim echoed postwar shifts in education in Britain. As a far greater proportion of working-­and middle-­class students entered university for the first time during the 1950s and 1960s, they also acceded to forms of intellectual rather than manual work.82 This was indeed the case for almost all of the group’s members, most of whom came from working-­class backgrounds and studied at polytechnic institutions and public colleges, rather than at elite architecture schools such as Cambridge or the Architectural Association.83 Yet, as I show in the following chapter, to affix Pichler’s helmet-­clad figure to a definition of emancipation involved a considerable misreading. Kleiner Raum was one of a series of ironic “prototypes,” works motivated by a profound skepticism about the emancipatory promises attached to emerging communications technologies. Such a misreading was telling. Pichler’s prototypes did not extend a sensory organ, like remote vision enabled by a periscope; rather, they enveloped the head, merging body and machine in a way that radically and humorously disconnected the subject from its familiar sense of the surroundings. With Archigram, the freedom promised by forms of connectivity—­the sensory and intellectual extension associated with being plugged into a disembodied “mental environment”—­was displacing a freedom associated with the assembly of interchangeable elements. Beneath these two prosthetic devices was a clipped headline that announced “Freedom for Women.” As the sole reference to feminism in a journal whose images have rightly been criticized for reproducing problematic gender stereotypes lifted from the media, the effort to make its definition of emancipation adhere with women’s liberation rang particularly hollow.84 Rather than an expedient bit of “graphic opportunism,” as Banham argued in the group’s defense, the collaging of “freedom for women” onto the group’s 104 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

disembodied definition of emancipation can be read as symptomatic of a gendered contradiction in the group’s notion of freedom. As Simone de Beauvoir argued already in regard to the presumed universality of existentialism in the 1940s, the epistemological conception of a disembodied, abstract, universal subject relied on a hierarchical binary that elevated mind over body, a binary that she argued was foundational to a larger patriarchal hierarchy.85 A gendered figure reasserted itself with a symptomatic force at the very moment that the plug-­in concept imagined that embodied differences were to be superseded in the form of greater access to a dematerialized and disembodied “mental environment.” That a vision of emancipation depended on forms of power and control that could not be fully perceived by the “emancipated” subject was neither a paradox nor strictly about invisible control via electronics. Rather, it was a contradiction, and a crucial blind spot, central to Archigram’s liberal vision of an abstract, universal subject whose freedom was conceived solely in terms of a capacity to choose. Such contradictions surface most palpably in moments in which graphic conventions begin to break down, as with Cook’s drawing for Control and Choice. A related contradiction, between the emergent screen’s status as immersive surround and as a control interface, came to the fore in the work of Rickaby, a Light/Sound Workshop student.86 Not unlike Peter Murray and Geoffrey Smyth’s appropriation of the plastic MM binding system for Clip-­Kit examined in the previous chapter, Rickaby created an illusory screen space by repurposing a banal graphic device of postwar paperwork—­the self-­adhesive, radius-­cornered “Blick” labels of the type used for color-­coding files.87 In posters created to promote the workshop, he photographed arrangements of such labels and then reversed these photographically to create opaque surfaces broken by zones of transparency. Together with Ron Sutherland, he developed a technique that overlaid these patterns on photographs to reveal or conceal the underlying material, rephotographing the results to create 35 mm slides, which were then presented in multicarousel projections. When projected, such slides created the impression of a shifting mosaic of diminutive virtual screens on the surface of a single screen. The resulting glimpses of super­market aisles, public parks, and the London underground were offered as a mode of perception analogous to the scanning of an urban field.88 The effect depended on an ambiguous, reversible tension between figure and ground. Seen as positive figures, the photographic surfaces read as an array of virtual screens floating in an infinitely deep darkness from which a viewer might select. Yet if they are seen as openings onto a space just beyond the projection surface, the black of the screen becomes an opaque mask applied to 105 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.18. Tony Rickaby, poster for Light/Sound Workshop exhibition, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 1967. Copyright Tony Rickaby. Courtesy of Dennis Crompton.

the spectator’s look. Rickaby’s and Sutherland’s technique raised a fundamental question about the screen. The screen could appear as a site where various channels were collected and juxtaposed, or it could appear as a complex filter through which an unseen agency controlled and predetermined visibility.

Instant City Given Crompton’s and Cook’s close involvement with the Light/Sound Workshop, it is worth paying more attention to Cook’s comment in 1972 that this teaching unit served as the “working laboratory” for Archigram’s Instant City project (1968–­70). Despite the widespread aesthetic and technical interest in such screen spaces, the connection between programming screens and design training did not, in fact, proceed very smoothly. The most detailed technical documents pertaining to the control systems developed for such multiscreen environments are from a research and design study that Crompton and Bowstead carried out for the Royal College of Art on the heels of the Brighton event. Commissioned by the Department of Interior Design, the project designed and tested four multiscreen, audiovisual display systems with an eye toward developing a curriculum within the college.89 The multiscreen displays were devoted, on the one hand, to “handling and

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rationalizing the large volume of potential material made available by modern communication channels” and, on the other, with developing facilities that provided “choice and participation for the spectator.”90 Crompton and Bowstead’s design for a Multi-­Source Information Display system used five screens to surround the audience on three sides, linking six automated slide carousels—­projecting “tight quotations and key visual images”—­with a 16  mm film on “the increasing complexity of information communication systems.” Crompton synchronized the various projection devices via sound pulses recorded on a strip of 16 mm film, a signal that also linked the movement of the slide projectors with four-­channel stereo sound from random sources, ranging from technical audio signals to taped TV commercials. In response to this initial experiment Crompton and Bowstead developed a theoretical project for a multiscreen “Media Discussion Machine.”91 Set up as a game enabling a degree of user control, four participants were to “build up” composite image sequences on screens animated by four remotely controlled slide carousels by making choices that were either cooperative or competitive. While acknowledging that the system’s applications were limited, they nonetheless argued that the game could be used to “familiar­ize

FIGURE 2.19.

Tony Rickaby and Ron Sutherland, photograph of multisource projection at Light/ Sound Workshop exhibition, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 1967. Courtesy and copyright Tony Rickaby.

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young children with audio-­visual equipment, prior to their introduction to teaching machines.”92 The multiscreen, multi-­image techniques deployed in the RCA curriculum recall the Eameses’ “Sample Lesson for a Hypotheti­cal Course” of 1953, where they presented students with a great number of simultaneous images both moving and still, together with sounds and smells.93 The “Sample Lesson” aimed to demonstrate an information theoretical concept of communication, but it also provided a model for their later multiscreen exhibitions. Choice meant not only selecting a single object but making connections between a multiplicity of images, signs, and sequences, to assemble a pattern from a flow that could not be fully taken in. The link between Brighton and the RCA highlights the ambiguous status of such screen environments. On the one hand, they could be experienced as a surrounding configured for ludic, synesthetic escape, an immersive activation of a spectator.94 Yet they also highlight how a knowledge of screen techniques became part of the larger retraining of perception.95 With Crompton and Bowstead, the multiscreen lesson aimed both to study the effect of such techniques on students of art and design and to establish a pedagogy enabling these students to operate and design such multi-­image, multimedia assemblies. The ability to recognize, interpret, and control a layered and ephemeralized screen was heralded in 1967 as an emancipatory form of participation, yet such screens were also becoming an interface, an assemblage of different devices, control systems, and graphic media, whose manipulation was to become a basic skill for more and more types of intellectual work in an era dominated by the growth of so-­called immaterial forms of labor.96 If Archigram’s environmental montages seem to anticipate the rearrangement of intellectual labor characteristic of an emerging phase of postindustrial capitalism, it is worth emphasizing the degree to which circumstances in London at this moment tended to thwart, rather than advance, pedagogical engagements with an electronic multiscreen architecture. As support for experimental pedagogy devoted to environmental screen systems quickly evaporated in art, architecture, and design instruction in the late 1960s, the integration of the Light/Sound Workshop’s techniques with interiors and entire cities turned out to be less inevitable than Latimer proclaimed. Two circumstances were crucial to this turn of events: the political upheaval that erupted in schools and universities during 1968, and a detachment between places like Hornsey and the Royal College and the larger electronics industry. Hornsey College, where the Light/Sound Workshop was situated, was the site of a high-­profile student occupation beginning in May 1968, an occupation that erupted out of a sit-­in protest against plans to amalgamate the art college 108 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

with a larger, nearby polytechnic institution.97 The ensuing six-­week occupation of the school’s North London location was regularly featured on local and national news before being forcefully broken up in July. In the aftermath, Lati­ mer, together with other teachers who had supported the students’ demands, lost his position.98 The Light/Sound Workshop was shuttered; its experiment abruptly terminated only a year after its success at Brighton. Meanwhile, the research program that Crompton and Bowstead had derived from the Light/ Sound Workshop, and hoped to extend to the RCA, was received by the college’s administration. Yet in the wake of events such as those that transpired at Hornsey, plans for the new curriculum were shelved.

FIGURE 2.20. Media Experiments 1–­4, Multiple Information Sources, system diagram, 1968. Research project, Royal College of Art London. Dennis Crompton and John Bowstead. Copyright Archigram.

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FIGURE 2.21. Media

Experiments 1–­4, Media Discussion Machine, equipment and wiring diagram, 1968. Research project, Royal College of Art London. Dennis Crompton and John Bowstead. Copyright Archigram.

Given these circumstances, it was not simply that Instant City extended and reworked elements of the Light/Sound Workshop’s environmental kinetics; it did so at the very moment that this project found itself blocked by historical circumstances. The dozens of drawings and photomontages through which the group developed Instant City occupy a curious position; at once in line with emerging techniques associated with immaterial labor yet seeking 110 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

to hold on to pedagogical opportunities that were concretely slipping away. The desire for a networked screen space had been set against the limitations of the page, yet when the institutional support for such screen experiments evaporated, they were relaunched by means of printed paper. The Light/Sound Workshop’s environmental kinetics was not the only germ for Instant City, however. Another was the intensive interest in audiovisual technologies in discussions of educational reform during the 1960s. Archigram’s Ideas Circus project (1968) was its most direct engagement with the use of media in education, and envisioned a mobile set of facilities designed to travel to different schools of architecture (Plate 14). Ideas Circus consisted of vans carrying slide carousels, film projectors, recording equipment, a print shop, a library, and inflatable enclosures, a “standard package of five or six vehicles that contain all the equipment necessary to set up a seminar, conference, exhibition, teach-­in or display. The package can be attached to an existing building, plugging-­into such facilities as are there” (Plate 15).99 The prosthetic imaginary that surrounded the plug-­in concept shifted here; rather than the extension of an individual consciousness, Ideas Circus was to be the electronic, audiovisual supplement for a deficient institution. “Static educational facilities,” they noted, “need topping-­up. Mobile educational facilities could so easily be a nine-­day wonder. The Ideas Circus is offered as a tool for the interim phase: until we have a really working all-­way information network.”100 The project was included in the special issue devoted to technolo­gies of learning that Cedric Price compiled for the magazine Architectural Design in 1968.101 The issue’s cover—­a photomontage of a miniaturized, wrist-­mounted television—­highlighted the centrality of electronic audio-­visual communications in Price’s thinking about educational reform. His National Schools Plan of 1966 had critiqued piecemeal efforts at the reform of architectural teaching and hinged on a vision of education that was both decentralized and reconnected electronically.102 The National Schools Plan envisioned the conversion of libraries into “information cells” and the establishment of a network for “primary information and instruction” across all UK schools to be delivered and exchanged via “electronic audio-­visual techniques.”103 Learning was a crucial term for Price, and he insisted on the distinction between the active gathering of information, knowledge, and skills, and “education,” which connoted systematic instruction and the “proper training and molding of the young.”104 If both Price and Archigram were invested in such “learning,” the manner in which they envisioned the role of screens differed drastically. When media screens appear in his and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace project, a project conceived as a “university of the streets,” they were set high atop the structure’s 111 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.22. Cover of

Architectural Design, “Learning,” special issue guest edited by Cedric Price, May 1968.

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gantry-­crane serviced frame.105 In the Camden Town Pilot Study, a smaller test version of the Fun Palace, screens again appeared elevated, this time above the entrance canopy, which defined “a zone visual influence,” advertising the project to the surrounding area. The screens that appear in Price’s more specifically educational projects were decidedly less spectacular. In the speculative Atom project (1968), realized with students at Rice University, various kinds of small screens were envisioned by subtly overpainting photographs of everyday situations in Houston.106 An “auto link” appears over the dashboard of a car driving down a highway; information screens, route maps, and timetables for education events appear on the seats on a public bus; “home study stations,” in the form of miniature television consoles, appear affixed to backyard lounge chairs or above bathroom counters. Such screens did not drastically transform the appearance of the environment; instead, they suggest how banal situations could be profoundly modified by the infiltration of screens connected to remote learning facilities. Ideas Circus, as the name implied, sought a very different effect; it aimed to visibly transform the schools into which it was plugged. The arrival of an information network would not be in the form of discrete and diffuse interfaces; it would be a colorful, noisy, and concentrated event.107 With Instant City the dramatic appearance and disappearance of a circus-­like event became a way to visualize how an array of electronic media might suddenly and radically transform an existing environment, providing a new type of concentration amid a general trend toward decentralization. Supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation, and first published in 1969, Instant City was described as “an assembly of instantly mounted enclosures, together with electronic sound, and display equipment that could be used to tour provincial towns.”108 True to Lati­ mer’s description, Instant City envisioned extending environmental kinetics to an urban scale; provincial towns, villages, and suburbs were to be bombarded with a dose of metro­politan intensity delivered by a caravan of trucks. In the heavy line drawings and montages of Herron, the screens of Instant City take on a diagrammatic clarity, extending from truck-­mounted and stationary

FIGURE 2.23. Cedric Price, Fun Palace: Night Perspective for the North-­east Area of the Pilot Project, Camden Town, 1964. Reprographic copy with black ink stamp on paper label. Copyright Canadian Center for Architecture. FIGURE 2.24. Cedric Price and students from Rice University, Atom, 1968. Interior of bus showing seats equipped with

electronic display devices. Negative with translucent red tape affixed to edges. Copyright Canadian Center for Architecture.

pylons, to self-­destructing “environ-­poles,” pneumatic enclosures, balloon systems, and robotic towers. Herron’s “Robotower,” the most detailed of these, revealed the degree to which the screen had become inextricable from a larger mobile media assemblage, part of a remote-­controlled, telescopic, ball-­jointed “robot” that brought together spotlights, projectors, projection surfaces, loudspeakers, heating, and power supply. In addition to such robots, the most elaborate initial drawings indicated vast projection screens. Unlike Price’s Fun Palace, these turned inward rather than outward, and defined an area capable of holding fifteen thousand people. As at Brighton, this space was described as an “arena.” The early drawings for Instant City envisioned a landscape of screens and enclosures under an inflatable canopy of signage, programmed lighting effects, and lightweight weather membranes, media reminiscent of the aerial structures that were to be tethered to Brighton’s West Pier. In place of a stationary mass of spectators watching the same thing on a single screen, Instant City envisioned crowds of mobile individuals who “tuned into their environment by choosing and mixing from a range of audio-­visual programmes.”109 If the big screen was cut loose from the dominant cinematic dispositive, the strategy was still to insist on a collective state of reception that counteracted the predominantly privatized mode of reception associated with domestic television screens. Yet such big screens proved to be a tricky architectural problem. Paradoxically, the scope of the equipment required for such a complete transformation of the environment threatened the instantaneity central to the project. Instant City, as initially designed, would not be instant enough. In November 1970 Cook and Herron updated Architectural Design’s readers about the project and emphasized how its assemblies were getting lighter and faster. “This has to be quick. It is on the scale of half an hour and five thousand people and amazement and the whetting of appetites.”110 A streamlined version of the project was to be deployed by one helicopter and two trucks, while a larger version was reconfigured for delivery by an airship capable of dropping equipment from its interior. An outmoded technology that had been used to drop bombs in World War I reappears as an ostensibly benevolent device for the delivery of media screens. Yet in the airship montages realized by Cook, the screens appear less as technical apparatus and more like a mirage. The images conveyed a psychedelic sense of the effects created by a dense array of suspended screens; a blast of turquoise suggests the abrupt colorization of an otherwise leaden landscape, a dramatic range of clouds appears on the surface of an eerily still lake, and an incongruously baroque urban scene materializes on the distant shore (Plate 16). 114 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.25. Instant City, Robotower section drawing (1:25), Ron Herron, 1968. Copyright 2017 Ron Herron, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

The emergent screens envisioned in the Instant City montages, not unlike the facilities of Ideas Circus, were neither strictly display surfaces nor enclosures; rather, they were understood to be a catalyst for the development of an electronic information network connecting towns and cities. Instant City’s arrival was to be “the first stage of a national hook-­up. A network of information-­ education-­entertainment ‘play and know yourself’ facilities.”111 The dozens of photomontages through which Instant City was developed served to locate the project’s nomadic assemblies in highly particular sites—­from St. Helen’s in South Lancashire coal country to the coast near Bournemouth, and from the intersection of the Los Angeles–­Santa Monica freeway to the Orangerie gardens in Kassel, the latter an unrealized project for Documenta 5 in 1972.112 Whereas in the earlier screen drawings, such as those made for Control and Choice, photomechanical fragments, films, and textures were placed on baseline drawings, with Instant City screens are increasingly envisioned by means of photomechanical fragments overlaid on site photographs. Such a 115 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

FIGURE 2.26.

Instant City in a field: elevation, 1969. Typical setup: right-­ hand panel, ink and collage elements on paper. Peter Cook. Copyright Archigram.

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technique was hardly new.113 Commercial firms were using photographic cutouts to visualize cinema interiors as early as the 1940s. Oscar Nitzchke’s project Maison de la Publicité (1935) had envisioned a multi­media facade a decade earlier, using photomontage to evoke a screen composed of a continuously changing arrangement of moving and still images, advertisements and slogans, signs and shapes in various colors (Plate 17).114 Nitzchke juxtaposed the contrasting particulate qualities of different types of printed matter to subtly mark the difference between media—­the evident grain of a black-­and-­white print evoked a newsreel, while a smoothly tinted image indicated a billboard advertisement on the right. Nitzchke’s montage identified the facade with the frame of an intermedial screen, a scrim that veiled the interior from the space occupied by the spectator while pointing to the work taking place within. In contrast to Nitzchke’s Maison de la Publicité, Archigram’s screen montages reveal a dramatic shift. With Instant City, optical media are no longer lifted and fit together into a facade, that is, a coherent “face” capable of mediating between inside and out. The montages of Instant City assembled not a vertical enclosure but a horizontal field resulting from

transfer operations, in which architects appropriated equipment and techniques from outside their field, and envisioned how their nomadic redeployment might catalytically transform a range of possible contexts. Mobile, responsive, and atmospheric audiovisual assemblages were to be plugged into provincial towns and industrial landscapes to address their deficiencies, just as collage, photomontage, and audiovisual systems were “plugged into” the drawing board. Herron later recalled the importance of such an intimate relation between technique and concept for the group during these years: The [technical] sources were expanded into any area that had drawing, painting, collage, photomontage and audio-­visual systems as the primary means of communication. These new means, in an architectural sense, of drawn communication were used to depict, amongst other things, environmental concepts such as the responsive environment, change, movement, time, the simulated environment, ambience/emotion/ atmosphere and architecture as process;

FIGURE 2.27. Warner Leeds (Charles H. Warner Jr., delineator), Paris Theater, interior, circa 1948. Gelatin silver photograph and chalk on paper. Charles H. Warner Jr. architectural records, 1940s–­1990s, Department of Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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concepts that did not lend themselves to communication through the standard architectural plan, section and elevation drawing, or even the ubiquitous axonometric projection.115

Techniques for transferring media particles became a privileged way to visualize ephemeral change, atmosphere, and environment in ways that plans, section cuts, and axonometric projections did not allow. Instant City emerged from an intense experimentation with composite imagining techniques, from the construction of pasteups to the techniques of overlay used in baseline drawings, and from the expanded, three-­dimensional screen environments of the Light/ Sound Workshop to multiscreen, multimedia “operas” that became the group’s preferred format for presenting work to students.116 The imaginary travels of Instant City’s hybrid “assemblies” provided an architectural scenario for the ongoing process of collecting, selecting, reassembling, fitting, and projecting photomechanical particles, a practice that had become ever more central to Archigram’s operations.117 Such an expansion was not strictly quantitative, but yielded a different conception of the screen and its role. Rather than movie screens or even multimedia facades, Instant City suggested a catalytic function for the screen, a more diffuse environmental assemblage to which mobile viewers “tuned” their attention and a set of elements that would help implant a larger national network of communications facilities. The capacity for screens to facilitate the implantation of a larger audio­ visual information network came closest to finding a constructed outlet in the group’s winning entry for an invited competition for an Entertainment Center in Monaco in 1969. To the group’s surprise, it won the competition, enabling it to form an office and proceed with design development over the next four years. The group’s deftness in visualizing indeterminate and changeable programs gave it an edge in projecting a compelling response to a brief that even Banham characterized as “ridiculously multifunctional” and was to include “sporting manifestations, spectacles of variety and the circus, exhibitions, balls and banquet facilities admitting 1500 to 2000 persons at maximum.”118 Rather than install a building on the seaside site, the group decided to refurbish the site into a park by placing the complex underground. Features Monte Carlo, as the project was called, remobilized the idea of a wired zone of regularly spaced plugs first studied in Control and Choice and further elaborated in Greene’s Logplug and Rokplug projects earlier that year. In the Monte Carlo project, the grid of plugs was structured at six-­meter intervals, both at the park level—­an artificially reconstituted “land beach” piled above a shallow dome—­and in the floor of the underground 118 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

salle polyvalente (Plate 18). The “land beach” can be seen as its own verdant screen, camouflaging the underground complex while offering a discreet set of plugs that fed off its electronic servicing grid, allowing visitors to peek into the subterranean interior through reverse periscopes. Between these two levels was a suspended serviced ceiling capable of handling the diverse range of audiovisual, lighting, mechanical, and environmental equipment required for the program. At Monte Carlo, the subterranean interior was a windowless black box whose flexible assembly of audiovisual recording, programming, and transmission elements aimed to “explode the old constraints of the stage show and single-­medium spectacle.”119 The effort to break apart the inherited spatial conventions of theater and cinema relied on forms of feedback associated with televisual screens. “Television monitoring and re-­projection,” they wrote, “could augment the thing going on in front of you. Of course the whole place is in many respects a live television studio.”120 In the subterranean box, they continued, there would be no dividing line between performance and transmitted event (projection, Eidophor, overlay of media); no dividing line between this space and the unknown (dissolving screens, sliding, lifting, multi-­ direction). Hopefully a visitor might need several visits to the place to even guess its colour or sonic distance.121

To underline the project’s similarities with a live television studio was more than a passing allusion. Features Monte Carlo appropriated not only the “kit” of a live television studio—­rolling cameras, projection screens, monitors, lighting gear, and control switches—­but its basic organizing principles. As part of his research at the Light/Sound Workshop, Crompton had used grid templates borrowed from the BBC’s recently opened TC7 live television studio as a design and planning device. The TC7 studio was a regular grid of floor plugs beneath a suspended gantry, with roughly the same number and configuration of access points as Archigram’s Features Monte Carlo. The blankly repetitive grid of the horizontal space frame central to the exhibitions examined in chapter 1 persists, yet it comes to be connected with a new element: a grid of electronic plugs embedded in the floor. As with the dehierarchized assemblies of Control and Choice, this continually changing interior called for a different mode of drawing. Archigram presented the project through sequence drawings, a technique that had emerged out of the group’s interest in “multi-­screen slide presentation as a demonstration mode.”122 A circular 119 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

point-­grid of regularly serviced plugs served as template for the arrangement of different assemblies, which could be shown one after another (Plate 19). The apparently abstract, orthographic, and autonomous qualities often associated with the grid cannot be opposed to the lush, unstable projections and reversions in the group’s perspectival montages for the interiors of Features Monte Carlo, which ranged from a panoramic video backdrop for a banquet to a rear-­projected, multiscreen exhibition and a kinetic-­audio visual labyrinth. The electronic grid was the very condition for a screen space defined in terms of a televisual system feeding its own flow of images back into itself. Such a conception echoed countercultural theorizations of video at this moment, which looked to grasp the radically different spatiotemporal and intersubjective dynamics of video feedback in terms of a topological mathematics where insides became outsides and outsides became insides.123 In a note written just after the competition, the group noted the “delightful paradox” that, on the one hand, the assemblies of Instant City could lead to airships hovering over Lancashire coal country, while on the other hand, they could be tucked inconspicuously beneath reclaimed land on the shore of the Medi­ terranean. “In both projects,” they wrote, “the ground just slips away.”124 Yet, with Instant City and Features Monte Carlo, the ground did not “slip away”; it was actively displaced by Archigram’s transfer operations. The rootless quality of mobile audiovisual telecommunications equipment was claimed as the means for addressing the limitations of unmovable places becoming, in the case of Features Monte Carlo, the support for a new kind of artificial ground.

Coda: Programming as Revitalization From the moment the screen environments of Instant City began appearing in print, they were interpreted in light of contemporary events. The privileged comparison was with the emergence of massive outdoor countercultural happenings, such as the pop concerts staged at Hyde Park, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight between 1968 and 1970. The fascination for these festivals, as Cook wrote at the time, lay in the “environmental intensity” created from sound, masses of bodies, light, portable hardware, and chemistry—­all factors other than the “built place.”125 Echoing Greene’s comments about the plug-­in concept representing a shift from buildings to devices, and from aesthetics to behaviors, Cook presented such “happenings” as evidence of a larger cultural trend in which environments were defined away from building and toward dematerialized audio-­visual “hyperspaces.” Like the interior of Features Monte Carlo, these were impermanent and flexible “audio-­visual structures” 120 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

Crompton. Copyright Archigram.

FIGURE 2.28. Plan, multiscreen display for Light/Sound Workshop presentation in BBC Television Centre Studio TC7, 1968. Dennis

distinct from any physical support or enclosure, systems that were capable of modifying themselves in relation to the movements and behaviors of users.126 Historians have often followed the group’s lead in interpreting Instant City as an architectural reflection of such countercultural formations, yet the comparison has tended to obscure a crucial aspect of Instant City’s cultural politics.127 If the project’s manifest affinities were described in terms of the temporary and spontaneous happenings of the counterculture, their latent condition of possibility was more closely linked to strategies of cultural revitalization. The Light/Sound Workshop’s Kinetic Audio Visual Environments event was directly supported by the creation of the Brighton Festival, an initiative to counter Brighton’s postwar economic and infrastructural decline by remaking it as a cultural destination. The competition for the Entertainment Center in Monaco was a project to use culture to transform an area of reclaimed land on the city’s waterfront. In this light, it is worth returning to the site of the K4 event in Brighton. The railway engineer Eugenius Birch designed Brighton’s West Pier in 1866. Origi­ nally defined by several pavilions in an orientalist style, Birch’s West Pier was an attraction that aimed to lure an emerging Victorian middle class to the coast. The pier might be seen as its own kind of media catalyst, offering a protected engagement with culture amid the unpredictable and changing maritime atmosphere. The small pavilions grew during its first half-­century to include an elaborate bandstand, and a one-­thousand-­seat concert theater, and weather shield. It was these pavilions, by the 1960s in general disrepair, that the K4 event reinhabited. Unlike the large-­scale investments the state was making in housing, there was little interest in investing in Victorian maritime engineering. As Banham later noted, it was at this moment that architects developed a new appreciation for such piers, seeing them as the distant ancestors of the megastructure concepts that emerged in the 1960s.128 When Brighton’s munici­pal council hired the cultural impresario Ian Hunter to direct the Brighton festival, the West Pier became a focal point.129 The techniques of the Light/Sound Workshop transformed what was arguably an antiquated screen into a pano­rama for the electronic age, one that Latimer, Bowstead, Cook, and Crompton continu­ ally presented as a foretaste of a future composed of responsive, ephemeral, environmental screens. To critique the superficiality of Archigram’s hybrid iconography of the circus, the pop festival, space program, and communication technologies, as some of their critics have asserted, largely missed the point.130 A range of montage techniques structured the screen through which an imperceptible and still-­unactualized electronic telecommunications network could be envisioned. If the process of envisioning such screen architecture brought 122 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

anxieties associated with invisible forms of control to the fore, it also served a proleptic function. For both the competition drawings for Monte Carlo and for Instant City, a different image of social, structural, and communicational relationships was expected to produce the conditions in which a detailed phase of technical specification could develop.131 Instant City’s sudden appearance, like a cheerful, uninvited guest, made such a parasitical arrival appear less threatening. The insistence on the instantaneous and the improvisatory was not incidental but crucial to the project’s media politics. If the screens of Instant City were to catalyze the spread of a national information network, this appeared not as an extension of coordinated central planning but in the guise of a temporary, reversible, and responsive set of facilities generated locally, much like the decentralized model of cultural festivals, like Brighton’s.132 At the same time, the link between Archigram and the Light/Sound Workshop allows one to see that a key role of such emergent screens was to shore up a faltering present. The dynamics of techno-­cultural reprogramming were embedded in the group’s earliest articulation of plug-­in screens: Living City depended on a decommissioned switch obtained from secondhand elec­ tronics shops. This intimate relationship between screens and reprogramming places the charisma that Banham saw in the pages of Archigram and Clip-­Kit in a different light. Such transfers have often been understood in terms of the architectural reassembly of technologies and materials spun off from space exploration, defense, telecommunications, or atomic energy research. While such visions figured in many Archigram projects, they were not the only type of transfer, nor the most dominant one. More often than not, assembly depended on transfer operations running in a different direction. Rather than invent new applications for space-­age materials, the more common procedure was to recycle quasi-­obsolete equipment, or to create a new hybrid assemblage that altered the function of existing consumer technologies. Such a flexible assemblage of audiovisual screen systems was the chosen filter through which places such as Bournemouth and St. Helen’s could be seen at the end of the 1960s, emblematic of the intensifying cultural and technical gulf that marked the rural–­urban divide. The immersive screen techniques tested out at the Kinetic Audio Visual Environments event were ostensibly oriented to human bodies, yet they also sought to extend and rewire the carcass of an earlier industrial modernity for a different kind of participation, one capable of putting this infrastructure to work in new ways. Archigram presented its Instant City photomontages as images of an electronic information network arriving in a place, yet in retrospect their importance may be in how they produced a new way to conceptualize place as 123 THE INFAMOUS PLUG

something to be seen through an overlay of imaginary media assemblies. (Plate 20). Such images induced the viewer to see cut-­and-­pasted paper not as discordant clippings, drawings, and figures extracted from printed pages but as channels carrying information, icons for an imaginary flow plugged into other locations. Such screens no longer mediated between inside and outside, surface and depth, private and public. They articulated a different set of distinctions such as emancipation and passivity, software and hardware, choice and control, explosion and implosion, center and periphery. In seeking to visualize an invisible network, the group’s screen montages effected a strange reversal—­the value of a location or a place came to be understood as a function of its connectedness or disconnectedness to the groundless technics of electronic signal processing. The comments on Instant City occasionally brought such dynamics frankly to the fore. Ultimately it was a provincial wish lay inside the apparently metropolitan agenda of Instant City. The project, Cook explained, was not to expand London’s hegemony but to undo it: It was this cumulative potential of the English provinces that has remained the constant idea. . . . All these people, towns, villages, cultures, sub-­cultures, myths, traditions, and quirks are, very self-­consciously, turning in on themselves. . . . If the net that could be spread by Instant City were dynamic enough things might perhaps reverse: the sum of the provinces might become the exciting scene, with the old metropolis becoming a cultural as well as physical embarrassment.133

The antimetropolitan bias of Instant City echoed the dynamics of dissolution that Archigram used to describe the limitations of the page. Just as print was to be extended by a hybrid, simultaneous, and distributed network of electronic media, the dissolution of separate towns into an electronic audiovisual network was to revitalize and repurpose a nation turning in on itself.134 The latent dynamics of retraining associated with the expanded multimedia screen resurface here. Archigram implemented an imaginary in which mining towns, seaside resorts, and rural villages might be rewired, adapted to a postindustrial condition, yet one in which metropolitan dominance would be redistributed rather than reinforced. As the intervening decades have shown, the forces associated with the emerging screen landscape were largely running in the opposite direction.135 The architects whose work is studied in the following chapters may not have shared the optimism characteristic of Archigram’s plug-­in strategies, yet for each of them it was a position that demanded a response.

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3

EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE Hans Hollein’s Media Assemblages

Our speed-­up today is not a slow explosion outwards from center to margins, but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-­margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. —­Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Sometime in 1964 a jagged silhouette appeared on the horizon of archi­ tectural culture. Rising above a cleft in gently rolling fields, its angular outline glinted of armored steel, an object whose form and technological sophistication were dramatically out of place in a landscape of shorn crops, unpaved roads, and sagging telephone wires (Figure I.1). Many found the image baffling, mysterious, shocking even. Titled Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, Hans Hollein created the photomontage by displacing a photograph of the USS Forrestal into a panoramic photograph of rural Austria. The image was one of a series of photomontages he assembled from an iconography of machines and machine parts—­including not only aircraft carriers but railroad cars, spark plugs, theodolites, and propeller turbines—­most of which were extracted from the glossy pages of the mass-­market magazines of the day, such as Life, National Geographic, and Scientific American. If the USS F ­ orrestal was incongruous, it did not appear entirely alien. It was not uncommon at the time to compare the vastness and complexity of contemporary aircraft carriers with cities. Nor did the USS Forrestal appear out of scale. Careful composition integrated the war machine into a surprisingly calm pastoral vision. Such tensions were characteristic of Hollein’s photomontages. In Urban 125

FIGURE 3.1. Hans

Hollein, Urban Renewal: New York, (Manhattan), 1964. Aerial perspective. Cut-­and-­pasted photograph on a photograph, 7½ × 9½ inches. Philip Johnson Fund. Copyright Hans Hollein. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Renewal: New York (1964) the drive shaft of a marine engine was pasted into the financial district of Lower Manhattan, echoing the violent insertion of much urban renewal while visually suggesting the island’s conversion into a massive ship. In Highrise Building, Sparkplug of the same year, a Champion spark plug taken from a magazine advertisement was embedded on the ridge of a distant hilltop, where it took on the allure of a futuristic tower. Yet of the numerous montages Hollein created during these years, it was Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape that provoked the most enduring reaction. Launched from Vienna, the image began a worldwide journey through the pages of architectural journals in Munich, Los Angeles, Paris, and London (to name only a few). It was exhibited at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York in 1965 and blown up as a cardboard cutout at the IDEA festival in Folkestone, England, in 1966, before entering the Museum of Modern Art in 1967.

While distinctive for their seeming simplicity, Hollein’s photomontages were not conceived in isolation. They replied to other evocative images in circulation during the early 1960s, from the lumbering, movable cities envisioned by Archigram’s Ron Herron in London (Figure I.3) to the ruined columns that Arata Isozaki inserted into a drawing of his proposed joint-­core megastructure in Tokyo in 1962 (Figure I.2).1 If the stranded industrial and military fragments that populated Hollein’s works resisted comprehension, they were not capricious exercises. Not unlike Isozaki’s Future City (Incu­bation Process), Hollein linked his montages to themes of metamorphosis and transformation, which concerned not only particular objects but a larger effort to expand architecture’s conceptual framework. The key role that montage played in advancing Hollein’s intellectual project cannot be grasped through his well-­known photomontages alone; it was also crucial to the conceptuali­ zation of the architect’s buildings, to the exhibitions mounted with his friend Walter Pichler, and to his editing of the magazine Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau (1965–­70). The cultural counterclaim that Hollein and Pichler broached at this juncture used wry humor to reject the functionalist thinking that had governed reconstruction in postwar Austria, and insisted instead that architecture communicate. Even more, he insisted that architecture be understood as a communication medium. Such a claim was made most notoriously in Hollein’s manifesto “Everything Is Architecture,” which redefined architectural thinking in terms of a radically open-­ended appropriation and reassembly of materials and images from the broadest spectrum of science and culture. Hollein’s appeal to “everything,” I argue, was shaped by a context increasingly defined by the electronic circulation of images and information, in which the emergence of global telecommunications was beginning to suggest a different framework for thinking about architectural and urban space. Thus, while Hollein’s stranded machines have often been interpreted as proposals for ready-­made buildings, they might be seen more effectively as part of a broader effort to envision architecture’s role in this shifting condition. Hollein projected a vastly extended concept of architecture, yet the image practice through which he did so also assembled a set of symptoms in which this vision of appropriation and assemblage was troubled by isolation and implosion. The first critical account of Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape appeared in 1965, in Friedrich Achleitner’s survey of recent Austrian architecture for the West German magazine Bauen + Wohnen.2 Achleitner, a poet and an architecture critic, painted a bleak picture of Vienna in the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Once the center of a vast empire, Vienna was now cut off by the iron curtain from its closest cultural and economic 127 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.2. Hans

Hollein, Highrise Building, Sparkplug, project. 1964. Exterior perspective. Cut-­ and-­pasted printed paper on gelatin silver photograph, 4¾ × 7¼ inches. Philip Johnson Fund. Copyright Hans Hollein. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

neighbors—­Prague, Brno, Belgrade, Budapest—­and was effectively a terminus at the edge of Western Europe. Deprived of a generation of architects, builders, critics, and intellectuals who had emigrated or perished in the war, Vienna was also a city cut off from its past. The critic’s gloomy assessment served as an effective backdrop against which to unveil a slow but steady return to order in the form of a Western-­oriented, international-­style architecture, an ambitious yet sober collection of stadiums, churches, shopping complexes, concert halls, museums, and schools. Tucked in behind this rational tableau was a footnote, a brief article titled “Notizen zur Geschichte einer neuen Strömung” (“Notes on the History of a New Trend”). Printed on thin canary paper, it included a series of projects by a younger generation of architects, among which was a reproduction of Hollein’s aircraft carrier photomontage.3 Together these projects provided a less sober and rational image, one that had little in common with the main postwar lines of development. In presenting the work, Achleitner took particular care to highlight the mechanics of montage central to Hollein’s project.

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Hollein’s transpositions are montages that can be performed partly on paper, but also in reality. Thus a railroad car—­planted on a base and starkly altered in scale—­becomes a monument. An aircraft carrier in the landscape becomes a city. It belongs to the nature of montage that the production [Herstellung] of unfamiliar relations not only results in the existence of something new, but also that things, or words, are themselves transformed.4

Montage, for Achleitner, involved a dual movement, at once a removal and transference of position (transposition) and an alteration in the character of the thing displaced (transformation). Montage, he insisted, was an opera­ tion that, while carried out on paper, could just as readily be performed “in reality.” Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape is typically seen in the way it was featured in Achleitner’s article: as a small, cropped reproduction. Yet the object in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection reveals that Hollein created the montage by pasting a cutout image of the USS Forrestal into a landscape made from prints of four photographs. Carefully pieced together on the diago­nal to create a seamless horizontal panorama, this composite landscape was mounted on a cardboard support and is surrounded by tape, glue stains, pencil notations, and crop marks. As I noted in the introduction, these material details indicate that Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape is less an “original” than the relic of a media operation: a pasteup used to prepare materials for reproduction in print. The critic’s emphasis on Verwandlung, or transformation, highlights how the analogical status of montage, even if it remained bound up with images of machines, turned away from an explicit concern with construction or function. Understood in terms of transformation, montage went beyond the repurposing of an object to stress a fundamental metamorphosis, a total and sudden change in character.5 The technical domain of the paste­up was a site of human production (Herstellung), but it was also the locus of something more mysterious—­a capacity for spontaneous change whose causes remained unexplained.6

Early Formations To grasp the nature of Hollein’s interest in such metamorphoses, one must reach further back into his formation as an architect. In a letter to the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, he suggested that the concepts found in the Transformations montages first emerged in some of his earliest works, citing drawings for an open-­air church made of railroad cars and another for a 129 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

house constructed from old car parts.7 The few drawings that match such a description date from 1958 to 1960, when Hollein was studying in the United States on a Harkness fellowship, following the completion of his first degree in Vienna. Hollein initially headed for the Illinois Institute of Technology to study with Mies van der Rohe, but was quickly pulled toward the West Coast, as if retracing the same Vienna–­Chicago–­California pathway established by earlier Austrian émigrés such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Hollein did not land in Los Angeles but in Berkeley. It was in Berkeley, or on the way there, that he would have made the drawings mentioned in his letter to MoMA, perhaps in reaction to the junkyards seen in his travels across the country. Hollein’s drawing reveals an interest in recycling the waste of consumer society, piling up ready-­made forms, however wrecked, to arrive at something like junk in equipoise. Yet these are not quite the transformations that appear in his later montages. Such early drawings have more to do with the clay, wire-­mesh, and papier-­ mâché models that Hollein made for his master’s thesis at Berkeley. Hollein arrived in Berkeley just as the school was merging the departments of architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture into a single entity: the College of Environmental Design.8 Attracted by the breadth of the “environmental” rubric, Hollein was able to conceive of a thesis project that would not have been possible at schools with more traditional architectural curricula.9 His master’s thesis pushed the already broad notion of environment to further extremes, an early instance of his interest in radically expanding the boundaries of the architectural discipline. Titled “Plastic Space,” it reads less like a thesis than a compact visual-­verbal manifesto, juxtaposing short poetic and programmatic statements with ink drawings, landscape photographs, and views of clay models, as well as photographs of a temporary exhibition of his “spaceradiator” models in a vacant lot at 2232 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley.10 If Hollein’s early work emerged in the context of a college of environmental design, the stress on transformation can be seen as part of his broader turn away from ideas about Gestaltung. Gestaltung, as codified and popularized by the German Werkbund and the Bauhaus, implied a process of creation whose goal was enduring, typical, and unified form, rather than sudden, unexplained metamorphoses. Hollein refused to see the drawings, structures, models, and landscapes in his thesis as works of art, architecture, or design, describing them instead as ambiguous “things.” “Things,” he noted in “Plastic Space,” “denotes approximately what is expressed exactly by the German word GEBILDE.”11 A term more commonly used in geology and medicine, 130 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

Gebilde denotes a formation composed less through the planning and assembly of discrete parts than through accumulation, sedimentation, or accretion.12 Containing the term Bild, Gebilde can convey the configured, organized qualities of an image, without being strictly visual. Capable of describing entities as disparate as mineral deposits or fluctuations in currency, Gebilde evoked a sedimentary type of image, whose shape was indeterminate, unintentional, and changeable, exhibiting purposiveness and order but not necessarily rationally planned human action.13 With their elevation off the ground and their dramatic cantilevered extensions, Hollein’s clay models were formally reminiscent of Frederick Kiesler’s contemporaneous models for the Endless House. While Hollein claimed to have developed his models without a knowledge of Kiesler’s work, his diary reveals that he sought Kiesler out toward the end of his trip to America.14 Rather than an exchange of affinities, however, his brief note on their meeting indicated that the two did not get on well at all.15 Yet Kiesler’s work would have been but one point of reference in a much broader search. Traveling to the Southwest, Hollein spent considerable time studying the Pueblo buildings of New Mexico, eventually publishing an article on them. Traveling to Mexico, he visited Aztec and Maya temple complexes. In 1960 he traveled to Los Angeles to see the work of Schindler and contacted the architect’s heirs to locate his drawings and writings. The material he collected was published in a special issue of Bau devoted to Schindler a few years later, and helped bring back to light a figure who had been forgotten in his native Vienna and indeed in most of Europe at this time.16 In this sense, Hollein’s early years seem to manage contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the plastic freedom of his Gebilde announces a confident vanguardism that threw the definition of architecture wide open. On the other, there was a motivation to excavate a historical memory gap that faced his generation of architects, most of whom were born in the 1930s and entered the field during the mid-­to late 1950s.17 Rather than a sequence of historically circumscribed objects, Hollein’s conception of Gebilde was broad

FIGURE 3.3. Hans Hollein, Car Building, 1960. Ink on vellum, 33.8 × 23.6 cm. Copyright Hans Hollein. Courtesy of Georg Kargl, Vienna.

131 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.4. Hans Hollein, Project for a City, 1960. Cut-­and-­ pasted photograph on printed paper. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

enough to support a free amalgamation of a diverse range of formal and historical reference points, ranging from pre-­Columbian ruins to the work of Schindler, and from highly wrought models to proposals for entire cities. The beginnings of the later Transformations montages appear more readily, however, in Hollein’s efforts to photograph his models, to render the ambiguous materiality of these “things” suitable for media circulation. In doing so, Hollein searched for ways to alter their relationship to surrounding spaces, either by placing them against a dark background or by lining them up on his roof, so that they appeared silhouetted by the brightness of the sky (Plate 21). Such visual isolation not only changed how these things were perceived; it was the precondition for transposing the models into other contexts. In Project for a City (1960), one of Hollein’s earliest photomontages, he inserted the clay forms into a photograph of wheat fields. Printed, cut, and transposed, the clay masses could call to mind prehistoric dolmen. Seen across the rooftops of Vienna, they could seem even larger: a compact city of the future raised above the old capital (Plate 22).

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Viennese Catalysts The fact that Hollein chose to insert his clay models into the Viennese skyline highlights the fact that while they may have taken shape in the breadth of a still-­nascent American discourse of “environmental design,” the photomontages were positioned in relation to the architectural culture of Vienna at the end of the 1950s.18 The feeling of a historical memory gap described by Hollein and by others of his generation may have been pervasive, but it was by no means total. Concrete links to prewar modernism were present in the form of professors teaching in the Viennese academies. The architect Roland Rainer had studied at Vienna’s technical college in the 1930s before joining the Nazi Party and moving to Berlin to join the military building administration. Resuming practice in Vienna after the war, he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and developed a plan for Vienna’s expansion. Rainer’s Wiener Stadthalle (1958), one of the largest projects in Vienna in the 1950s, deployed an innovative form of prestressed concrete structure, while his subsequent master plan for the city (1958–­62) sought to decentralize Vienna in ways that echoed the earlier plans of Otto Wagner at the turn of the century.19 Hollein, along with most of the other members of the emerging generation, chose not to study with Rainer but with Clemens Holzmeister, an architect and stage designer who had recently returned to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts after having lost his post following the Anschluss in 1938.20 Less committed to the rationalist emphasis of interwar modernism, and less tainted by a Nazi past, Holzmeister’s pedagogy was eclectic, intuitive, and site-­oriented, encouraging students to engage with a range of approaches. Yet this pedagogical milieu provides little in the way of sources for the rekindled interest in montage evident in Hollein’s Transformations. The rediscovery of practices associated with the historical avant-­gardes took place outside the schools and was closely connected with the city’s art milieu. Hollein would retrospectively note the catalyzing effect of a range of manifestos that emerged in Vienna at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s.21 One important cultural force at this moment was the work of the Wiener Gruppe, which included Achleitner, as well as the poets, writers, and visual artists H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener. The Wiener Gruppe produced manifestos as well as experimental poetry, illustrated books, demonstrations, and performances.22 Skeptical of subjectivism, the group favored anonymous, collaborative, and absurdist forms of writing, whether printed, read aloud, or used in performances. Montage, both visual and textual, was prominent; works were assembled through the selection 133 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.5. Children

play in front of the Stadthalle in Vienna, designed by the Austrian architect Roland Rainer, circa 1960. Photograph by Barbara Pflaum. Copyright Imagno / Getty Images.

and rearrangement of phrases and photographs from books, newspapers, and illustrated magazines, as well as from advertisements, pornography, and medical journals. If the performances and demonstrations organized by the Wiener Gruppe often echoed the transgressions and provocations of Dada cabaret, the visual and linguistic montages produced by members of the group hewed to a more reduced and sober visual format, closer to postwar experiments in concrete poetry than to the more visually disjunctive aspects of Dada or surrealism.23

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It was also during these years that Hollein would have encountered Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Verschimmelungs-­manifest gegen den Rational­ ismus in der Architektur (Mold Manifesto) and Markus Prachensky and Arnulf Rainer’s Architektur mit den Händen (Architecture with One’s Hands). Aggressively antimodernist in spirit, these manifestos violently rejected what they saw as the narrowly conceived functionalism of Vienna’s postwar planning, affirming instead a return to raw materiality and an almost primordial creativity.24 The early 1960s also saw Günther Feuerstein’s “Thesen zur Inzidenten Architektur” (“Theses on Incidental Architecture”), which was preoccupied less with a neoprimitivist return to primal energies than with counterposing marginal or residual types of assembly to a vision of architecture as an applied science derived from techniques of industrial management. Feuerstein’s critique of technocratic “super planning” resonated with the editors of the situationist-­affiliated Spur group in Munich, which included his text in a 1961 issue of their eponymous magazine devoted to unitary urbanism.25 While Hollein cited such manifestos, and shared in the general climate of revolt against functionalism, his position remains distinct. In Hollein’s brief statements from the early 1960s, he began to move away from his earlier interest in the ambiguous plasticity of Gebilde in order to return to architecture. “Back to Architecture” (“Zuruck zur Architektur”) was, in fact, the title of the lecture he delivered in 1962 at Vienna’s Galerie nächst St. Stephan. In it, Hollein opposed the philosophy of “architecture as the shaping of a material function” to “architecture as the transformation of an idea through building.”26 This conceptual turn—­from formal shaping to intellectual transformation—­was crucial, appearing at the very moment that Hollein made photomontage central to his work.27 The cutting and collection of images from the pages of magazines stood in contrast to the rough sedimentary accumulation of Gebilde, just as the transposition of image fragments into new contexts was more explicitly a form of visual assembly, a position that sought to explore intellectual transformations wrought from the displacement of preexisting materials.

Technological Atlases The turn to montage also coincided with Hollein meeting Walter Pichler, with whom he would frequently collaborate in the coming years. Pichler’s practice ranged from architecture to graphic design and art, and both shared an interest in technological machinery. In their early collaborations, the shared preoccupation with technology crystallized around images of war machines. 135 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

Born in 1934 and 1936, respectively, Hollein and Pichler were too young to have participated in World War II, yet were old enough to have been profoundly marked by it. The images of military technology might be seen as a lingering shadow of such experiences. A section drawing through an armored personnel carrier, complete with men loading shells into the vehicle’s gun, which Hollein made while still a child, reveals a precocious awareness of architectural drawing conventions together with an early fascination with war machines. Pichler’s fascination manifested itself in the collection of photographs of military machinery and engineering works extracted from popular magazines such as Scientific American and National Geographic. Together with the artist Alfons Schilling, Pichler planned to organize this collection of tear sheets into an atlas, a visual compendium ironically referred to as their “Kinderbuch” (“Children’s Book”). The “Kinderbuch”—­which was given the working title “We Are the First Slaves of the Machines”—­was never published, but traces of the collaboration persist in other forms.28 The gigantism of postwar military machinery appears in a photocollage that Pichler made while visiting Schilling in New York in the early 1960s. What appears to be an inflated radome mounted on a seaborne platform—­a key element of the SAGE (Semi-­Automatic Ground Environment) air defense network—­was bluntly inserted into the background of a snapshot of Schilling on the Brooklyn bridge. Appearing at a moment when the SAGE network was being deployed, the photomontage was also contemporaneous with Buckminster Fuller’s far more iconic project for a two-­mile-­wide dome over midtown Manhattan, a smoothly airbrushed photomontage of which began to circulate in the spring of 1962.29 In contrast to the subtle sheen of Fuller’s hyperefficient, lightweight environmental enclosure, Pichler’s radome platform was overpainted in black gouache, reducing the photograph to a stark silhouette, which looms as menacingly as an atomic cloud. The effect is less one of integration than of surrealist condensation: a sea-­based radar infrastructure used to detect intercontinental nuclear missiles suddenly appears in the midst of the metropolis, dwarfing, rather than containing, the skyscrapers of Manhattan. While visually incongruous, Pichler’s insertion of the radome into the metropolis served as a canny reminder that urban centers increasingly depended on a far-­flung, and largely invisible, network of radar and transmission and stations. An almost identical radar platform, as well as a host of other military equipment, figured prominently in Hollein and Pichler’s first collaboration: the exhibition Architektur: Work in Progress at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in 1963, the sole surviving document of which is a slim catalog.30 The abstract sketches, drawings, and models carefully resist explanation, acquiring 136 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

a minimal degree of legibility via captions that linked them to only the most general of referents: Haus (house), Gebäude (buildings), Sakrale Gebäude (religious buildings), Unterirdische Stadt (underground city). The legibility of these minimally identified drawings, which could be read as sculptures, models, buildings, or ideograms, was further established by a diffuse sense of resemblance with a carefully selected group of photographs of military and industrial infrastructure. These were condensed in the catalog’s central spread, which presented a grid of military machinery, defensive structures, buildings for heavy industry and space exploration (likely drawn from the “Kinderbuch” collection), as well as pre-­Columbian monuments. Seen in this context, a vaguely pyramidal form with thin, cantilevered protrusions appearing in a drawing labeled “Sakrale Gebäude” echoes both Mayan stepped pyramids and the carefully cropped images of a radar array from a contemporary battleship. On another page, drawings by Hollein—­simply titled “Buildings”—­rise out of the earth on tall stems, rhyming with images of oil exploration and radar platforms standing on thin supports above the water.

FIGURE 3.6. Hans

Hollein, drawing of an armored personnel carrier, 1945. Graphite and colored pencil on paper. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

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FIGURE 3.7. Walter

Pichler, untitled photomontage, 1963. Cut-­and-­pasted paper and ink on gelatin silver photograph. Copyright Archive Alfons Schilling, Vienna.

The exaggerated, gravity-­defying cantilever in a drawing labeled “House” resembles the outstretched deck of an aircraft carrier, or the billowing horizontality of a mushroom cloud. Stripped of captions, the photographic grid pits formal resemblances—­ present and past, machine and monument—­against any notion of historical 138 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

or typological specificity. Writing in the catalog’s introduction, the architect Joseph Esherick—­who had supervised Hollein’s thesis at Berkeley—­ interpreted the work as a call for “absolute architecture,” one that sought to reestablish a “kinship of spirituality with the ‘anonymous builder.’ ”31 Such a reading drew Hollein and Pichler closer to a broader interest in vernacular traditions during these years, such as Esherick’s concern for the regional architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area, Aldo van Eyck’s interest in the Dogon villages of West Africa, or Jørn Utzon’s celebration of pre-­Columbian monuments.32 Yet Hollein and Pichler’s “anonymous builders” were the unknown designers of contemporary engineering and military constructions. Assembling a diffuse field of linkages between objects as different as ancient temples and contemporary missile launch platforms, Hollein and Pichler’s miniature atlas produced an impression less of overall identity than of unstable, impure resemblances. Collected and montaged together, the atlas

FIGURE 3.8.

R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, Dome over Manhattan, 1960. Airbrush on gelatin silver photograph, 13¾ × 18⅜ inches. Buckminster Fuller Papers, Stanford University. Courtesy Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

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FIGURE 3.9. Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, pages from Architektur: Work in Progress, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, 1963. Copyright Hans Hollein.

FIGURE 3.10. Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, page spread from Architektur: Work in Progress, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, 1963. Copyright Hans Hollein.

pointed to a latent contradiction in Hollein and Pichler’s discourse; the layout insinuated resemblances between their drawings and the high-­tech manifestations of the military-­industrial complex, while their text looked to claim autonomy from any determinism, whether of function, program, or technology. As Hollein wrote, “Today, for the first time in human history, in this moment in which scientific knowledge has made astounding progress and technologi­ cal perfection can achieve anything, let’s make an architecture which is not determined by technology but an architecture which is pure and absolute.”33 Hollein and Pichler’s grid appeared at a point of high tension in the Cold War, marked by the unbridled confidence in technology evident in the scale of something like Fuller’s enormous domes and by the dystopian pessimism of films like Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), with its vision of an underground world of survivors following a nuclear holocaust. Appearing at a moment of heightened public attention to fallout shelters and bunkers following the Cuban missile crisis, their fascination with such subterranean architectural visions was itself fueled by an attention to extreme plans for underground architecture, such as those contemplated by another Viennese émigré, Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, mathematician, and cofounder of game theory. Hollein and Pichler read Morgenstern’s little-­noted The Question of National Defense (1959) with interest, in particular the economist’s discussion of building massive shelters capable of placing a significant portion of the U.S. economic infrastructure permanently underground.34 Morgenstern’s plans for underground architecture were “absolute” yet not autonomous—­a radical commitment to the total transformation of human life in the face of potential nuclear annihilation.35 In the visual rhymes that link Hollein and Pichler’s sketches and models with images of missile silos and bunkers, a recovery of architecture’s independence was conjugated as an image of an armored indestructibility, whether in the hard bases of the U.S. Strategic Command or the three-­meter-­thick walls of the World War II antiaircraft towers still standing in Vienna.36 Hollein and Pichler’s discourse of the “absolute” can be seen as a canny, even cynical, reframing of such anxieties regarding nuclear annihilation. Their considered pairing of ancient monuments with military engineering structures took place alongside a wider reassessment of engineering and technology within architectural culture during the early 1960s, a key document of which was the exhibition Twentieth Century Engineering, mounted by Arthur Drexler in 1964 at the Museum of Modern Art. Hollein and Pichler had sent their work to Drexler in the early 1960s, and Drexler facilitated the collection of their work for the museum’s permanent collection.37 The exhibition reassessed the implications of advanced engineering for architecture, 142 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

by reconsidering the modern movement’s earlier rhetoric of the machine.38 Recalling Walter Gropius’s epoch-­making 1913 celebration of American grain silos, Drexler distinguished the early twentieth-­century architect’s praise of engineering’s lack of superficial artistry from the postwar situation, in which “the craft of the engineer has become in its own way ‘artistic,’ and structural complications disproportionate to the actual problem are often praised for their ‘imaginative’ daring.”39 Against the contemporary trend “toward the elaboration of form for its own sake,” Drexler was concerned to recover a vision of engineering as “an art grounded in social responsibility.” Yet even as he called for such responsibility, he was compelled to concede that engineers lacked control over “the political or economic apparatus that would facilitate a truly responsible use of our technology.”40 Throughout the brief text, Drexler’s optimism struggles to contain such deep contradictions. If the “purposeful grandeur,” “graceful curves,” and “heroic scale” of engineering constructions were readily admired by architects and the public alike, their scale could not be easily reconciled with that of the contemporary city. When such awkward juxtapositions crept into the exhibition’s photographs, he remarked, it was easier to restore the landscape’s equilibrium not by imagining the removal of dams, bridges, or towers but by eliminating “petty distractions” such as houses and cars. More than anything, Drexler’s catalog envisioned such an equilibrium through the formal juxtaposition of photographs featuring dams, bridges, hangars, stadiums, cooling towers, highways, and artificial islands. The carefully cropped images in Twentieth Century Engineering render the differences between landscapes and places largely invisible, providing a format in which a vastly dispersed collection of projects could be evaluated and compared in terms of similarities of form. In this, Drexler’s catalog mobilized a technique of visual rhyming influentially disseminated by György Kepes’s The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), itself deeply influenced by the layouts conceived by his mentor László Moholy-­Nagy. To grasp the new postwar “landscape” of art and science, Kepes proclaimed the need to reverse the hierarchy of text and illustration, and asserted the priority of seeking out visual analogues: “In spite of the pitfalls in visual analogues, we must attempt visual linkages in the new landscape.”41 Kepes’s notion of the “analogue” was closely associated with a concept of image drawn from Gestalt psychology, which held that the eye did not simply see the world but actively organized perceptual stimuli into an image on the basis of “correspondences of shape, color, size, and direction.”42 Despite differences in their material, scale, and origin, the analogous patterns found in aerial maps and electron micrographs, in feathers and nerve ganglia, represented a “similarity 143 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.11.

Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam, Dez River, Iran, 1963. Page spread from Arthur Drexler, Twentieth Century Engineering, 1964. Copyright The Museum of Modern Art.

of form [that] is by no means accidental. As patterns of energy-­gathering and energy-­distribution, they are similar graphs generated by similar processes.”43 Drexler’s engineering constructions—­organized by visual parallels, such as open and closed, smooth and faceted, convex and concave, elevated and subterranean—­marshaled such “similari­ties of form” to unify distinct and disparate constructions, offering them as evidence of a deeper morphological identity. In 1965 when Hollein, together with Pichler and Feuerstein, was given the opportunity to take over the direction of Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, one of their initial articles assembled a new landscape of engineering construction.44 Yet the subtle shift in how such images were combined highlights the vast difference separating the visual rhyming in Drexler’s cata­ log and the disjunctive collisions in Pichler and Hollein’s atlases. Hollein’s article “Technology” was developed out of images initially featured in his and Pichler’s 1963 exhibition, as well as a number that had been reproduced in Twentieth Century Engineering. Yet the pages of Bau redirect the visual rhyming: roadways dug out of the earth at an underground missile launch complex in Colorado and are paired with an elevated highway in Southern California, the concave basin of a radio telescope in Puerto Rico is compared with the convex, stepped terraces of an iron-­ore extraction facility in southern Austria. Formal comparisons are further exacerbated through humor-

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ous, polemical collisions, as when the reinforced spherical compartments of a cement truck appear alongside images of lightweight inflatable radomes, or when a 1917 sketch for an optical factory by Erich Mendelsohn appears next to a concrete observation tower from World War II. Here the assertion of resemblance operates as an empty shell stripped of any faith in the more profound similarities of form that motivated Kepes’s and Drexler’s compari­ sons. The result was a series of disjunctive resemblances. Likeness understood as something superficial, served as a an unreliable guide to identity or difference. In juxtaposing a superhighway with a rocket launch facility, a radome with a concrete truck, an eyeglass factory with a wartime observation tower, one cannot say whether Bau was trying to forge a link to, or mark its distance from, the utopian technological aspirations of the 1920s and 1930s.45 Where Drexler had sought to contain the contradictions surrounding such an iconography, Hollein and Pichler looked to amplify them. The “new scales ruling the landscape,” they argued, were taken less as statements of rational and responsible design than as “enormous possibilities for projection.”46 Such “Ungeheuer projektionsmöglichkeiten” suggest forms enlarged to a gigantic scale, but also an awareness of engineering’s connection to the monstrous side of postwar technological modernization. It was through considered juxtapositions in print that Hollein and Pichler were able to radically detach such structures from their technological purpose and their situation. This detachment was ideological, expressing a disengagement from Drexler’s unrepentant belief in engineering as an art grounded in social responsibility, yet it was also material—­tied to a practice of montage in which images were treated not as faithful representations but as photographic materials whose effect depended on the adjacent images with which they were assembled.

Aircraft Carrier in a Landscape The gap between Drexler’s similarities of form and Hollein and Pichler’s dissonant resemblances provides a further insight into the Transformations photomontages. In Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape (Figure I.3), Highrise Building, Sparkplug (Figure 3.2), and Urban Renewal (Manhattan) (Figure 3.1), transformation does not alter the transposed object’s form; rather, the perception of change arises solely from its displacement into a new photomechanical context.47 Central to the defamiliarization produced by Hollein’s montages was the capacity of such displacement to manipulate the perception of scale. Such an awareness of scalar manipulation was linked to a culture of print and the making of magazines, where the architect or graphic 145 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

designer would specify ratios of enlargement or reduction in order to fit an image into a matrix of elements on a page. It also appeared at a moment when techniques of enlargement were intensively used in exhibitions; the capacity to project enormousness from limited materials and humble means being a ready ana­logue for an architecture of outsized “visionary” ambitions. Once again, it was Drexler’s work at MoMA which served as a crucial reference point. The exhibition Visionary Architecture, which he had curated in the fall of 1960—­and which Hollein almost certainly saw—­assembled a panorama of unbuilt projects that were nonetheless described as efforts “to rebuild the world as he [the architect] knows it ought to be.”48 The architect’s visionary capacity was seen to reside in drawing, what Drexler described as a history of “paper architecture unhampered by technical details, unopposed by the whims of patrons, and freed from the exigencies of finance,” which the exhibition traced from Étienne-­Louis Boullée and Giovanni Battista Piranesi to Kiesler and Kiyonori Kikutake.49 For all the importance it placed on paper, Visionary Architecture did not exhibit any physical drawings; rather, it presented visi­tors with photographic enlargements of drawings. Dramatically spotlit on dark black walls, these appeared less as artifacts than as magnified, disembodied “visions” floating in abstract depth. When Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape was exhibited at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York in 1966, it was placed in a context with other visionary enlargements, from Fuller’s photomontage for his Tetrahedral City project—­an enormous pyramidal housing complex floating in San Francisco Bay—­to Claes Oldenburg’s drawings and collages of common domestic objects enlarged into overscaled urban monuments (Plate 23).50 Enlargement was the mode favored by the organizers of the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture at Folkestone, England, that same year—­who reproduced projects by Hollein, Yona Friedman, Archigram, and others as outsized, freestanding cardboard cutouts that the magazine Architectural Design described as “visionary designs suitably blown up to larger than life size.”51 Indeed, the more Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier circulated, the larger it seemed to grow. When it arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967—­included in the exhibition Architectural Fantasies, devoted to the work of Hollein, Pichler, and Raimund Abraham—­ the museum prepared a twelve-­foot-­wide enlargement, which was the first thing visitors saw on entering the exhibition.52 It is telling that most commentators at the time saw the montage in relation to both the emerging megastructural trend of the 1960s and in a lineage rooted in the teens and twenties. It was clear to Drexler that the work of Hollein, Pichler, and Abraham was most legible in comparison to the steamships of Le 146 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

Corbusier or the aerostations of Antonio Sant’Elia, even as he struggled (as the eliminations on the draft of his press release text indicate) over whether this was a “new monumentality” and how one might read the vehicles and machines in these montages. The Transformations, he noted, had “an ambiguous but vaguely menacing overtone—­the alienation produces a symbol equally applicable to the present urban situation or [to] the ultimate domi­ nation by the machine.”53 World War II provided the readiest locus for this unsettling connotation. Drexler compared the effect of the montages to the experience of the enormous antiaircraft towers that still loomed over Vienna, buildings whose “terrifying scale imposes a surrealist threat to the otherwise placid street.”54 Picking up on visual comparisons already developed by Hollein and Pichler, Drexler went so far as to obtain several photographs of the towers from their architect Friedrich Tamms, four of which were included in the exhibition’s introductory didactic panel. As the German “ungeheuer” suggests, enormousness and monstrousness could not be easily detached from each other. The gigantic scale of military-­industrial engineering remained colored by the shadow of a very real past. The association of Hollein’s montages with Vienna’s antiaircraft towers pointed directly to the unresolved question of Austria’s Nazi past, yet it was a history that remained suspended and inaccessible, protected within the designation of “architectural fantasy.”55

FIGURE 3.12.

Installation view of the exhibition Architectural Fantasies: Drawings from the MoMA Collection, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967–­68. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photograph by George Cserna. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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The association of the Transformations with inflated scale remains all the more intriguing, since Hollein did not use enlargement to make the images. The multiple versions of Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape that Hollein created were made solely by displacing printed elements into new photographic contexts. The apparent size of a spark plug or a nuclear-­powered aircraft carrier depends on the scale of the landscape into which it is pasted—­one appears to grow enormously, while the other, set against a vast horizon, shrinks to manageable size. Hollein’s landscape montage constructed a panoramic continuity that recalled, and even exceeded, the expansive vistas that cinemascope screens had made increasingly familiar to moviegoers in the 1950s.56 Rather than juxtaposition, or alteration of the fragment, it was the odd quality of the “fit” that created the effect. As Hollein’s letter to MoMA noted, he was so aware of the importance of fitting that he drove around Austria to photograph just the right landscape for an aircraft carrier or a spark plug.57 What we see in such a photomontage is not an aircraft carrier pasted into a field but the design of a field capable of receiving such a transferred image. The field has tended to remain invisible to most commentators, who concentrated on the dramatic shape of the warship. Photomontage was the means for designing such a field, a cultural technique mobilized by a desire to claim the aircraft carrier, and other objects, as architecture. Such dynamics appear obliquely in the analysis of Reyner Banham, who, looking back from the 1970s, saw Hollein’s photomontage as a herald of the megastructural movement. The overhanging silhouette of the flight deck suggests shelter to what is below, but the top-­heavy effect was clearly the mode of the day. Furthermore, the asymmetrical arrangement of the main elements, with the bridge structure at the side of the flight deck instead of axially astride the hull as in Le Corbusier’s “ocean greyhounds,” seems to have had consonances with the relationship of public buildings to public places. . . . In either case the residual silhouette above ground is clearly what rang a bell for the megastructuralists.58

The photographs were likely taken on trip with Pichler to an ancient stone quarry near St. Margarethen in Bürgenland, a relatively undeveloped area of Austria along the border with Hungary and thus adjacent to the Cold War’s “iron curtain.”59 To insert an aircraft carrier into such a context in 1964—­in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning of the “military-­industrial 148 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

complex”—­was to effect a transfer that interrupted such historical associations, just as it troubled the more peaceable efforts to liken megastructural form to hill towns, as had been described by early theorists of megastructure such as Fumihiko Maki.60 The tension internal to the montage stems from two simultaneous contrasts—­constructing the continuity of the landscape and creating disruption through insertion of American military hardware. A key condition for such a tension was Austria’s own belated entry into larger processes of industrial modernization spurred by the Marshall Plan. In contrast to other Western European nations such as France or Germany, in the early 1960s Austria remained marked by stark disparities between city and country, one that the sudden appearance of the aircraft carrier threw into sharp relief.61 Hollein may have relished the “menacing overtones” that Drexler saw in his montages, yet he also kept them discreetly at the horizon, distancing their disruptive appearance by integrating them into a pastoral vision of landscape.62 Associating megastructural scale and silhouette with the technological projection of American military power around the globe, Hollein’s montage harked back not only to the 1920s but to some of the earliest montage effects popularized in turn-­of-­the-­century satirical postcards. Not insignificantly, these also touched on anxieties about militarism. With the outbreak of World War I, a range of postcards appeared in which German Zeppelins kidnapped key pieces of “French” patrimony. (There was an irony to the fact that a number of these, such as the Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, were themselves the fruits of France’s own nineteenth-­century imperial expansion.) In such a postcard, montage appears again in its etymological sense of elevation, a modernization in which the lightness of steel-­framed aircraft conquered the weight and mass of stone. If something of an older stratum of montage persists in Hollein’s transformation, the effect of satire has long vanished. With Hollein, the uprooting has given way to implantation, the transposition has been completed, the particles have settled, and any laughter this act might have provoked has long died out. Yet Banham was not incorrect to note the distinctiveness of the USS Forrestal’s outline. The ship was the first of a new class of postwar “super­carriers” launched in the 1950s and designed specifically for the jet age. The need for an extended runway to accommodate jet fighters was solved by angling the flight deck nine degrees off axis and cantilevering it dramatically over the port side, and grouping the bridge into a vertical control tower at starboard. Such a silhouette was a compressed image of a key technological assemblage, at once airport, ship, housing, power plant, and mobile communications center. It was this new configuration that Hollein cut out. 149 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.13. Unknown artist, photomontage postcard, printed in Paris by Ernest Le Deley, circa 1914. Caption reads: “To sharpen his great sabre, Wilhelm kidnaps the obelisk with a Zeppelin.”

In this sense, Banham’s comment about the silhouette touches on something larger, if one remembers that the silhouette is not only a descriptor but a technique of visualization with its own history. In Pliny the Elder’s recounting of the mythic origins of painting, the silhouette was a medium between a departing lover and a surface on which his shadow fell, a process of transfer that retraced the singular way a body interrupted rays of light.63 Such a medium transfers the image by isolating and flattening it, eliminating context, as well as tone, modeling, color, and relief. Silhouettes remerged as a fashionable portrait medium in the late eighteenth century, and by the turn of the twentieth they were mobilized for very different purposes: notably for naval reconnaissance in manuals such as John F. T. Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships.64 Jane’s collection of silhouettes was no longer a question of individual profile but one of composite profiling: a comparative form of seeing and a tracing derived from photography. A similar silhouette was one of the more curious photomontages to appear amid the photographs of steamship decks and passageways reproduced in Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture. Architecture comes to be measured against engineering by cutting out hallowed Parisian monuments, from the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame to Charles Gar-

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nier’s Opera, and placing them against the silhouette of the Cunard Aquitania. In the process, a strange reversal takes place: the steamship appears as a solid and immobile ground, while monuments tilt like uprooted fragments.65 As color printing became more accessible in the 1930s and 1940s, silhouetting also came to be used as a media technique for processing color separations. Le Corbusier would exploit this type of silhouette in the photo­ montage cover of his book Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. (1938), published to accompany his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux in 1937.66 Juxtaposing fragments of artillery and aircraft with housing and urban planning, the cover vividly telegraphed the book’s polemical contrast of expenditures on armaments with public investment in housing. In 1960 Alexandre Persitz—­longtime friend of the architect and editor of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui—­brought Le Corbusier’s Des canons, des munitions back into the postwar discussion in an article dubbed “A Little Panorama of Strange Equivalences.”67 A lavish multicolor foldout, Persitz’s panorama contrasted photographs of military equipment and contemporary architecture in an effort to raise awareness of the renewed military buildup in France and elsewhere in Europe. Such juxtapositions visualized architecture through the lens of monetary equivalence—­two submarines were comparable to the cost of a grande ensemble, while a nuclear-­powered aircraft carrier represented an investment comparable to the planning of Brasília. Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier montage, by contrast, offered a panorama that was mute and undidactic, soliciting less equivalences than associations between the ship and other similar, yet absent, visual signs. The types of articles from which Hollein drew his materials were altogether more triumphant, describing the USS Forrestal and the USS Enterprise as state-­of-­the-­art nuclear-­age machines whose tactical value was their autonomy from land-­based command, capable of supporting the lives of thousands of inhabitants for years at sea without needing to return to port.68 At once a floating airport and traveling command center, such war machines provided a new idea of mobile centrality, breaking away from an older model of space dominated by the distinction of center and periphery. Replacing the surface of the ocean with the surface of wheat fields, the montage stripped the aircraft carrier of its capacity for movement, while it also transformed the perception of the city, which came to be envisioned as an enclosed, self-­sufficient vessel. Despite, or perhaps because of, its landlocked appearance, the aircraft carrier montage suggested a different kind of mobility. If the type of silhouette that appears in Hollein’s montage was a medium, it was no longer a projection linking a body and a surface but a retracing that enabled particles to move 151 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.14. Photomontage of Parisian monuments against the silhouette of the Cunard Aquitania. Reproduced in Le

Corbusier, “Des yeux qui ne voient pas . . . ,” Vers une Architecture, Paris, 1923. Courtesy BNF. Copyright F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

FIGURE 3.15. Le Corbusier, Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. Photomontage cover, Editions de

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1938. Copyright F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

FIGURE 3.16.

Alexandre Persitz, detail of multipage foldout from “Petit Panorama d’équivalences insolites,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, December–­January 1960.

between photo­mechanical processes. Physically detaching an image from a photomechanical continuum also unmoored it semiotically: the meaning of the fragment was set adrift. Cutting separates but also prepares new connections. The photographic information contained within the silhouette, while not physically altered, takes on a different significance by virtue of its resuturing, even as it invites the idea of further possible substitutions. Such a silhouette-­cut allowed a warship to be read as a multivalent abstract shape, 153 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

a detachability of form from meaning that enabled an aircraft carrier to be analyzed as containing a set of ideas concerning buildings and public places. In the silhouette quality of Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, the very processes that subtend image transfer reveal themselves as the crucial support for an era attuned to imagining new kinds of mobility. The connotations of a war machine could be transformed not by altering its physical substance but simply by changing its photomechanical context. In this sense, Hollein’s transfers hinged on the metaphorical pole of signification, a “carrying over” that aligned photomechanical displacement with imagined substitutions—­the ship is a city, the spark plug a tower, the railroad car a monument. The process of reconnection and resuturing did not only concern the landscape panorama but the web of associations that Hollein assembled around this image. Hollein placed the aircraft carrier montage at the head of his 1965 article “Zukunft der Architektur” (“Future of Architecture”), where he developed an argument about the historical shift from the legacy of cities as structures for defense and containment to cities as apparatuses for communication. The contemporary city is less walls and towers than a monstrous communication machine, a manifestation of the opening and domination of space and the connection of humanity. It is dynamic, not static. Its symbols are different, its plastic expression is defined through the elements of this communication, through signs of spatial order and organization, through the three-­dimensional manifestations of its supply systems. . . . The enormous technical constructions necessary to make these cities function, themselves contain a latent monumentality, and it is the task of architects to discover it and bring it forth.69

If Hollein emphasized the contemporary city as a vast machine for communication and supply, the montages and illustrations accompanying the article converged not around familiar urban images but around structures in isolation: aircraft carriers, oil platforms, walking cities, and space stations. In a manner reminiscent of the “closed-­world discourse” that Paul N. Edwards has argued pervaded computer research during the Cold War, Hollein’s enthusiasm for connectivity and communication was expressed via its seeming opposite, autonomous spheres capable of being closed off from a hostile exterior realm.70 After a lengthy description of the focal points of the city of the future, Hollein described the arrival of such spaces: 154 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

We are nearing the time of totally closed environments, aerial or subterranean, above water, below water, as they are seen foreshadowed already today in polar stations, artificial islands at sea, aircraft carriers, the NORAD Command center, and the like—­autarchic units, that lead to the Station, the city in space. (Here in the totally man-­made environment lies the greatest possibility for architecture to show what it can and should do—­when no changing heavens, no sun, nor change of seasonal color can throw its merciful shadows upon our failures.)71

As in the Transformations montages, physical detachment produces a deeper form of semiotic transposition, such “totally closed environments” were not the end of architecture but “its greatest possibility.” The article took up Hollein and Pichler’s game of connecting images through the silhouettes of their armored shells and brief laconic captions to envision a communicative condition in which isolation was intimately combined with connection, evident in the networked relationships between the closed worlds of space stations, autarchic units, and decentralized command centers.

Implosion The effects of cutting and silhouetting that Hollein was mobilizing in print were also crucial to his earliest architectural commissions, such as the Retti Boutique (1966), the Christa Metek Boutique (1967), and his exhibition designs. Hollein began to conceptualize his design for the candle maker Retti in relation to the surrounding facades on the Kohlmarkt through shallow photomontage models, in which he combined photographs, drawing materials, and aluminum foil.72 The resulting facade stands out as if cut from a sheet—­in this case not paper but aluminum. Rejecting its surroundings, the facade turns inward, inverting the Kohlmarkt’s glazed commercial facades. The sharpness of the frameless aluminum corners allows the portal to read as an optical cut, an ambiguous silhouette-­sign that suggests a schematized ionic column, a pop art candle, or the negative space between two back-­to-­ back Rs. Flattening opens onto semiotic ambiguity, but surprisingly it also emphasizes depth; the silhouette-­cut operates like a keyhole into another world, inviting voyeurism from passersby who peeked into the candle shop as if it were a capsule from the future.73 Again and again in Hollein’s early projects, silhouettes produce ambiguous signs that appear as if cut from a surface through which one looks. The glazed opening of the Christa Metek shop 155 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

was derived from dozens of drawings exploring the intersection of the owner’s initials with a set of concentric circles reminiscent of a jet engine or a target. Such an optical intersection was made literal in the relation of the shop windows to the radiating baffles of the mechanical ventilator that Hollein designed for the facade (Plate 24). Viewers to the furniture exhibition Selection 66 peered through cuts and slots that were suggestive of pupils. The series of identical doors that greeted visitors to Hollein’s Austriennale at the 1968 Milan Triennale opened onto a series of parallel corridors, an obstruction that the visitor had to pass through to access the Austrian exhibit. The doors appeared uniform, a device for filtering the masses of visitors, yet the corridors varied drastically, from a claustrophobic micro-­supermarket with a window onto a pile of refuse to a barely passable opening whose contour was the shape of a three-­ dimensional population dia­gram, to a series of file drawers containing nothing but numbers. In this FIGURE 3.17. Hans

Hollein, models for Retti Boutique, 1965. Paper, tin foil, and graphite on gelatin silver prints. Archive Hans Hollein, AzW and MAK, Vienna.

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elaborate system, the products of Austrian industry—­the purported content of the exhibition—­were nowhere to be found. The goods were discreetly hidden, visible through another silhouette-­like cut in the opposite wall, arranged in their own closed environment. From the twinned circles punched in the doors, to the silhouette peephole in the wall, to the circular profile of the disposable red-­and-­white glasses produced every fifteen seconds by an automated plastic forming machine in the heart of the exhibit, Hollein treated flattened graphic signs as frames through which to look (Plate 25).

FIGURE 3.18. Hans Hollein, Retti Boutique, Vienna, 1966. Photograph by Franz Hubmann. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

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FIGURE 3.19. Hans

Hollein, axonometric of Austriennale Exhibition, XIV Milan Triennale, 1968. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

However much such capsules evoked motifs drawn from the world of pop art or from contemporary space exploration, they were also vehicles for a return to Viennese traditions of total design. In the tiny interiors of the boutiques, the architect meticulously detailed all elements—­from door frames, lighting fixtures, display units, handles, fittings, furniture, and bags for customers. Such capsular interiors were semiclosed worlds. Not unlike Adolf Loos’s nearby Kärtner Bar, Hollein used facing mirrors to create an illusion 158 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

of extension within the tiny space. Yet unlike Loos, whose mirrors met at the corner, Hollein’s faced each other. Their reflections line up exactly with the axial facets of a centrally placed lighting pendant. The effect was less one of spaciousness than of mise-­en-­abyme, a destabilizing infinite regress as illusory extension turned into implosion.74 The processes of detachment and reconnection, cutting and displacement, that informed the architecture of the Transformations montages and of Hollein’s early interiors and exhibitions can be described in terms of two signifying operations: selection and combination. In the construction of a

FIGURE 3.20. Hans Hollein, Retti Boutique, interior, Vienna, 1966. Photograph by Franz Hubmann. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

montage, the two processes are not isolated but occur in constant relationship with each other. Selection implies a choice from a matrix of possible alternatives, a set of likenesses and opposites that remain absent. Combination connects elements contiguously, as positive terms present in the image. From the preoccupation with an absolute architecture to the emphasis on new types of symbolism, Hollein and Pichler deployed operations that short-­ circuited contextual, metonymic relationships. Pichler and Hollein’s complex drawings are captioned only as “architecture,” “house,” or a “piece of a city,” and were visually aligned with isolated structures and “autarchic environments.” Conjunctions fall away, and words seem to operate independently of other words. Juxtapositions and comparisons affirming resemblances domi­ nate over devices for articulating relations of context and vicinity. Similarly, photographs were decontextualized and seen in relation to a mutable field of potential substitutes and resemblances. Photomontages isolated image particles and displaced them from one setting to another. Models resisted any reference to scale. Facades rejected their vicinity and turned inward. Such an aesthetic tactic might be seen less as an attempt at irony, as has often been argued, than an effort to disturb prosaic communication.75 Propositions were short-­circuited; individual words could no longer be connected into phrases. As Hollein and Pichler’s work became more preoccupied with architecture’s relationship to information and communication during the second half of the 1960s, it began to move in a different direction: from metaphor toward metonymy. The shift appears in the terms of provocation they employ, but also in the form of the montages they realized. There was a turn away from the singular photomontage—­an isolated photomechanical fragment displaced into an alien setting—­toward forms of montage modeled on flow, in which multiple simultaneous juxtapositions were to be read across sequential pages. By the same token, the effort to evoke a larger field of disjunctive resemblances was displaced by the assembly of relationships between groups of visually dissimilar images. This shift in the practice of montage parallels an ongoing intellectual problem for Hollein; what did understanding the city as “an enormous communication machine” imply for architecture? The problem departed from an iconography of infrastructure and machinery and increasingly sought to grasp the space of electronic transmission. Such a space could no longer be contained by the city but operated through a decentered, globalizing network of information carried by satellite relays. The architecture of this emerging condition required a different spatial understanding, one conceived no longer in terms of monumentality and symbolism, or through an opposition of center and margin. 160 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

For Hollein, the effort to comprehend the spatiality of such emerging electronic networks implied an enlargement of architecture’s definition. A year after he published his aircraft carrier montage in Bau, Hollein wrote: “Limited conceptual determinations and traditional definitions about what architecture is and what its means are, have today largely lost their validity. Today virtually everything becomes architecture.”76 Once again, Hollein insists on a “return” to architecture, yet a paradoxical one in which architecture stands to be redefined by its very lack of definition. Recognizing that the entirety of the environment, from housing to clothing, artificial climate controls, and television broadcasts, was “virtually” architecture, Hollein argued, forced a reorientation: architecture could no longer be understood solely as building.77 The reframing of architecture as a medium drew closely on the dynamics of extension and implosion developed in the popular media theory of Marshall McLuhan.78 “According to McLuhan’s definition,” Hollein noted, “housing is a medium for the control of bodily temperature, a medium building has sought for thousands of years to perfect. The most perfect architecture of this kind, however, is the space suit. It is an architecture that frees us from the ‘built environment’ and opens new possible relations between humans and with space.”79 If architecture was conceived as a medium for controlling bodily sensations—­from temperature to vision to emotions—­the reverse was also implied: media were not immaterial signals and messages but physical extensions of the human capacity to act and feel in space. The recurring spatial emphasis in McLuhan’s media theory was not haphazard; it drew on his conversations with architects and architectural historians from Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Sigfried Giedion to Lewis Mumford and Buckminster Fuller.80 McLuhan proposed his conception of media ­extension—­a prosthetic “outering” of senses—­through an urban analogy; the expansion of media from speech to writing, printing, photography, telegraphy, radio, cinema, and tele­vision was compared to the growth of human settlements, from nomadic camps to villages, cities, regional conurbations, and mega­cities.81 If the extension of media made the means of communication more accessible and universal, media, like settlements, also grew more fragmented and specialized, marked by entrenched distinctions between centers of power and marginal hinterlands. The centuries-­long expansion of media would be fundamentally transformed, McLuhan argued, by the acceleration characteristic of electronic speed. The emergence of satellite communication might reasonably be expected to further atomize such an already fragmented condition. Yet McLuhan saw the opposite. The speeds of electronic transmission would not bring about a further shattering; rather, they were an “implosion” that would result in what he 161 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

termed instantaneous reassembly. “Our speed-­up today is not a slow explosion outwards from center to margins, but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-­margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole.”82 On the one hand, this reassembly was a cognitive act, a mental piecing back together enabled by electronic media; an ability to absorb and reunite “all the mechanized bits” of earlier media. Yet it was also a reassembly in the older sense of a human gathering. Electronic space was imagined as an idealized medium of trans­ individual consciousness, a recovery of the organic communities damaged by modernization—­McLuhan’s famous likening of globe to village. Hollein’s very first article in Bau had argued that the contemporary city could not be comprehended via the problems of traffic, security, housing, or a “new” monumentality but by grasping its status as “a monstrous communication machine.” The multipage montage article “Background USA” that he, Pichler, and Feuerstein conceived for an issue of Bau devoted to America in 1965 built on this insight by foregrounding the intercontinental “electronic space” brought into being by satellite transmission. The article opened with a different vision of landscape; a rebus-­like juxtaposition of the Grand Canyon and a computer, evoking the idea of an “information landscape.” Following this initial collision, a double-­page grid of images, similar in structure to those used in Hollein and Pichler’s Architektur catalog, presented a synopsis of American buildings and architects from the 1890s to the 1960s, duly captioned with names and dates in the grid’s interstices. This grid structure continued on the following spread without the familiar architectural landmarks. Names and dates disappeared. The grid, as a structure for containing individual illustrations, gave way as images of billboards and signage ran continuously across multiple frames. The image of Marilyn Monroe repeated serially across the page in a manner reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s contemporaneous silkscreen paintings. A jukebox, an air conditioner, a headlight, and a Coke bottle appear, products of American design that evoked environmental sensations of sound, temperature, light, and taste. Such a grid was less a container for illustrations than a visual mosaic not unlike the multiple banks of monitors of a television control room, in which relations of contiguity have become more important than resemblance or identity. On the following spread a cropped view of the facade of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments bleeds to the edge of the page, contrasting with the diminutive image of the laughing architect, together with the celebrated phrase “Less is more” fittingly stranded within the blankness of the page. The 162 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

article concluded with a geodesic dome that doubled as a wired planet, its triangulated armature containing images of an elevated highway overpass in California, bundles of electronic cables, a submarine, the Guggenheim museum, and an inflatable pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Here a new building system was presented as a new image of space, a premise not unlike the one that Giedion developed two decades earlier in Space, Time, and Architecture, in which the emergence of the modern movement was taken to reflect a new conception of “space-­time.” Gied­ ion was himself a sometime photomonteur, and concluded his book with his own photomontage of Rockefeller Center, which he saw as exemplary of a new urban pattern that could not be summed up in a discrete building but in urban complexes “conceived in space-­time.” The crisscrossed, worm’s-­eye views of Giedion’s montage evoked a complex that demanded to be seen on the move, and an eye capable of arresting this motion. The photomontage, Giedion explained, was an analogue for an eye that “functioned like a high-­speed photograph,” a comparison made visually by placing Harold Edgerton’s 1938 high-­speed photograph of the golfer Bobby Jones across the page. Hollein, Pichler, and Feuerstein’s montage was an effort to visualize seeing in a satellite age; in this, it was less like a high-­speed photograph than the shifting, low-­resolution transmission of a cathode-­ray tube. Once again it is a question of particles, of producing an image of architecture from the tension between particles. Low-­resolution images were famously the most interesting ones for McLuhan. In contrast to the high-­ precision photographs of Edgerton, the mosaic perception associated with television transmissions were significant because of their noisy qualities, compelling a shift from eye to ear and mind, they compelled the viewer to participate in the low-­resolution field by assembling it into an image. By 1966 Fuller’s domes had become global icons, not only of the FIGURE 3.21. Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, and Gunther Feuerstein, “Background USA,” in Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, no. 6, 1965. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

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FIGURE 3.22. Page

layout from Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941). Arranged by Paul and Peter Fritz Literary Agency on behalf of The Estate of Sigfried Giedion; copyright 1982.

architect’s design philosophy, but through continued use in state-­sponsored exhibitions from Kabul to Milan to Moscow, of American soft power. The dome that concluded Hollein, Pichler, and Feuerstein’s article was shifting from a hot icon to cool silhouette, a remediated, low-­definition framework, whose enlarged half-­tone dots conjoined images as if they were a series of channels. Beginning with the collision of a computer and a panoramic vista and concluding with geodesics and satellites, the category of landscape had given way to the more amorphous notion of “background,” no longer a unified visual space into which an object could be stably embedded, but a condition of variable resolution that the subject of the electronic age actively assembled into an image.83 The paradox of expansive implosion that McLuhan associated with electronic space attracted the attention of several architects by the midsixties, among them Hollein’s friend John Johansen.84 Johansen explicitly contrasted

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FIGURE 3.23. Hans

Hollein, Walter Pichler, and Gunther Feuerstein, pasteup for “Background USA,” Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, no. 6, 1965. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

McLuhan’s media space to Giedion’s earlier account of the emergence of a new “Space–­Time conception.” Not only is the fixed axial reference point of the Renaissance out-­ of-­date, but so also is the “Space-­Time,” or moving station point conceived by Sigfried Giedion, which might be said to represent the mechanical age of the wheel. Now I would make the observation that we will have a new station point of the electronic age: one that is multiple and simultaneous, a “simul-­station.” Obviously we don’t change our physical position within a building as instantaneously as we follow an intercontinental discussion by Telstar. However, we may now be trained to project ourselves into positions, to identify ourselves with many other stations and circumstances.85

Unlike the moving eye that fascinated Giedion, the “simul-­station” was a relay point of dispersed simultaneity within a broadcast network. Less a physi­ cal movement from one point to another than a virtual projection, subjects in this network understood themselves to be simultaneously connected with disparate “positions,” “stations,” or “circumstances.” The “intercontinental discussion by Telstar” cited by Johansen pointed to the first commercial satel­ lites to relay television, telephone, and telex messages between continents. 165 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

Such electronic transmissions transformed both the spatial sensibility of the subject and the category of the image. “The images of the electronic world,” Johansen continued, are continuous, simultaneous, nonclassified, noncodified. . . . They represent a continual flow of data, not measured or measurable. This process has been described as a “mosaic” effect of composite impressions producing total comprehension. Many effects and impressions are absorbed by the viewer instantaneously, involving a fusion of the senses. The spectator becomes part of the system or process and must supply the connections. He is the screen upon which images are projected. Images, as on TV, are low definition, therefore require high participation.86

The electronic images of the “simul-­station” implied a form of virtual yet intensified involvement in which the subject no longer looked passively at a screen but became the screen, at once a surface and a relay assembling data and images into a greater “mosaic.” Paraphrasing McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media, the low-­definition images characteristic of such telecommunication were not a barrier or lack but a field of information in which the subject was immersed, connecting the bits and pieces. A different kind of constructive analogy resurfaces in Johansen’s account of the mosaic. The viewer who “supplied connections” between discontinuous channels needed to reassemble flows of the dissimilar into a new kind of whole, deriving a larger pattern of consistency on the basis of parts. As the image of this electronic, multisensory involvement was likened to forms of information flow, assembly was understood less as physical connection than as a cognitive assembly akin to the part-­to-­part workings of metonymy.

Everything Is Architecture The latent tensions surrounding such an electronic mosaic came to the fore in the most notorious article published in Bau: Hollein’s 1968 manifesto “Alles ist Architektur” (“Everything Is Architecture”).87 Appearing as a double issue in January 1968, the cover declared “Alles ist Architektur” with a photomontage in which an exaggeratedly yellow cube of Emmentaler dwarfs Vienna’s skyline beneath a field of optically fluctuating half-­tone dots. If the cubic yet globular structure of the cheese might in retrospect appear strangely contemporary, the selection of Emmentaler was particular, playing 166 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

off a local expression used to describe an ugly building.88 The photomontage humorously captures a device reaching a turning point, as the aircraft carriers, spark plugs, and turbines began to disappear from Hollein’s montage practice, which turned to engage image flows and metony­mic chains. Putting together came to hinge less on fit than on the articulation of adjacencies and sequences. It was in this way that he sought to tackle the thorny problem of how to visualize “Everything.” The text of “Everything Is Architecture” was entirely separated from its images, which played out over twenty-­ four pages, enabling a broad array of visual associations and contrasts to be “read” into this flowing continuum. In its restless movement from one thing to another, “Everything Is Architecture” sets up a sequence no longer organized by devices that emphasize visual likenesses but through the repetition of the slogan “everything is architecture” across a field of shifting, disjunctive referents, bound together by bare contiguity. Such likenesses do not disappear entirely but subsist in a subordinate manner, flaring up occasionally in the form of jokes. “Everything Is Architecture” produced a lateral montage premised on flow, soliciting the reader’s capacity to assemble multiple possible connections across its pages. Yet it also created disruptions and breakdowns in that flow. Roman Jakobson’s account of aphasia provides a helpful framework for analyzing such disturbances. For Jakobson, aphasic disturbances of speech highlighted the polar structure of any symbolic process: the tension between the fundamental rhetorical devices of metaphor and metonymy.89 The lateral flow of “Everything Is Architecture” recalled aspects of what Jakobson termed “similarity disorder,” a short-­circuiting of metaphor, similarity, and substitution, which had the effect of emphasizing relationships of contiguity and contextual association. Aphasics who could no longer articulate relations of similarity, Jakobson observed, used the word Everything as a stopgap, inserting it in place of the shift from

FIGURE 3.24. July 23, 1962: the first transmission with six monitors to Europe of television programs from America via the Telstar satellite. Photograph by Midge Aylward. Copyright Keystone / Getty Images.

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FIGURE 3.25. Hans Hollein, interior pages of “Alles ist Architektur,” Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, no. 1, 1968. Copyright Private archive Hollein. The sequence of pages in the article should be read from left to right across the two-page spread.

a word to its synonym, or from an image to its proper name.90 The montage developed in “Everything Is Architecture” orchestrates a similar disturbance, interrupting the shift from image to proper name, systematically inserting “everything is architecture” where this link might have been established. It is less that architecture has become synonymous with the image than that it has come to function as a term for stabilizing open-­ended sequences of images. If the provocation “everything is architecture” kept returning to the statement “architects must cease to think only in terms of buildings,” the montage series insisted that other things keep taking its place, and that architecture serves a connective rather than a metaphoric or symbolic function. Such a turn called for a different manner of reading, one centered less on securing and deciphering meaning in the image—­determining what it is like—­than on establishing the points of connection between images, and following the paratactic linkages they set up.91 While soliciting a multiplicity of possible readings, the images in “Everything Is Architecture” are neither random nor indeterminate. The montage was structured by rhythms of expansion and contraction, alternations between large and small. The sequence could be read forward or backward, jumping from any one point to another. Read in parallel, important divergences between the visual manifesto and the textual manifesto appear; the visual argument at times seems to run against the grain of the text, a tension in which the conflicting interpretations of the nature of mediation come to the foreground. Hollein’s fluid montage treated images as pieces of information within a horizontal sequence, echoing a shift away from an interest in the form of communication and supply infrastructures to the framing and appropriation of information channeled by such systems. Hollein writes: “There is also a shift of importance from meaning to impact. Architecture has an effect [Wirkung]. The way I take possession of an object, how I use it, becomes important. A building can become entirely information—­its message might be experienced entirely through informational media (press, TV, etc).”92 On the one hand, “Everything Is Architecture” enunciated an expansive confidence in an expanded discipline, one able to appropriate the widest array of objects and environmental media. Such appropriation could take the form of enlarging the definition of the architect, evident in a spread that assembled photos of the designer Paco Rabanne, the painter Roberto Matta, the Warsaw mayor Marian Spychalski, and the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, all of whom had studied architecture.93 More commonly, taking possession echoed a pop interest in the culture of mass consumption.94 The montage reproduced a large number of everyday goods plucked from advertisements 170 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

and other glossy sources, among them: lipstick, sunglasses, pneumatics, spark plugs, wing nuts, combs, glasses, chairs, postage stamps, pills, and spray cans. The pills and spray cans were not only goods but projects in which Hollein sought to explore an architecture defined through chemical and atmospheric means. Svobodair, a “Raumspray für Buros” (space spray for offices), was designed by Hollein in collaboration with Peter Noever, and marketed by the furniture firm R.Svoboda & Co.95 In an advertisement that appeared elsewhere in Bau, the spray appeared like a comic book hero exploding onto the scene, redirecting a depressive metonymic chain: “Boss in a bad mood, stuffy office atmosphere, unable to concentrate, overworked, irritable, down, tired, idea-­less, insecure, unsuccessful, out: PFFF!, ooh, ahh, good, good, delicious, comfy, refreshing, again, again, again, more, over and over.”96 The lateral, paratactic syntax appears as a restless process of seizing hold of any-­object-­whatever “again and again, over and over” in a vain effort to shore up waning stimulation. Emblematic of a novel, ephemeral, and disposable commodity, here the aerosol spray became a vehicle for, and comment on, architecture’s dispersal into a logic of commodification extended to the more immaterial, atmospheric, and psychologized regions of design. If Hollein’s manifesto visualized the capacity to appropriate virtually anything as architecture, a different reading of the sequence suggests that this expansion was also presented as a kind of desublimation. The introduction to the issue was brief and couched in loosely psychoanalytic terms: Some of our readers think that the Ungers issue has been too dry, others found too much text and too little illustration in the issue on the occasion of the central association of architects anniversary. This time there is less to read and more pictures to contemplate. Immersed in observation, let your fantasies [Phantasien] work and your associations run free. Wherever you look, it is all architecture and all are architects.97

The manifesto depended on a canny double movement; architecture is immersed in and identified with all things, but it simultaneously remains one thing: architecture. A process of dispersal and disturbance comes to assemble a new mirage of coherence; the movement that stretches architecture’s identity to its breaking point also aims to reassemble these associations to make them signify architecture in a new way. This provocation circles around the motif of extension, this time not as appropriation but as release, implying the onrush of content that had been previously sublimated. Hollein’s 171 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

manifesto invoked the collapse of “traditional definitions,” proposing a release from the definition of “architecture” as an “artificial transformation . . . accomplished by means of building.”98 The means of determining the environment had changed radically, as demonstrated most conspicuously by developments in military strategy, space exploration, and communications technologies. “Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—­ and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication or shelter.”99 Such extension accompanies the repetition of mostly female bodies at various points in the image sequence: a photomontage advertisement in which a giant woman reaches down to caress a car; Nikki de Saint-­Phalle’s sculpture environment She: A Cathedral, which had created a scandal at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1966; a naked Hundertwasser during a “demonstration against contemporary architecture”; Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #81; another scantily clad woman out of whose laughing mouth come the words “everything is architecture”; the conical silhouette of a woman covered in fur taken from a painting by Max Ernst; and a computer-­generated image of a nude, developed for Bell Laboratories by Leon D. Harmon and Ken C. Knowlton.100 The rhyming of photographs and drawings in Hollein and Pichler’s early work manipulated a sense of vastly indeterminate scale that suppressed any indication of human presence. The desublimating argument in “Everything Is Architecture” invokes a shift toward this absent subject. “These far developed possibilities lead us to think about the psychic possibilities for determining the environment. After shedding the need for any physical shelter at all, a new freedom can be sensed. Man will now be at the center of the creation of an individual environment.”101 The universalized subject returns in the guise of an individual with the capacity to determine his own environment, a psychically charged space. This new freedom erupts from the disappearance of building, a disappearance that is not inevitable but a negative injunction formulated and staged by means of montage, by repeating the word architecture in relation to a series of objects and images that would appear to have nothing to do with buildings. Just as “Everything Is Architecture” triumphantly called for the point at which architecture was freed of its relationship to shelter in order to leave behind the stubborn need for protection, the body reasserted itself in a charged manner. Symptomatically, as the subject “Man” returns to the center, the images that allow themselves to be read as buildings come to circle around a repetition of fetishized and stereotyped female bodies.

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Encapsulation The vector of implosion and compression in “Everything Is Architecture” was more legible, by contrast, in images of cells and capsules, which can be seen as a displacement of Hollein and Pichler’s interest in closed environments into a different set of forms. From the telephone booth and the jet pilot’s helmet, to space capsules and space suits, the expansion of the human environment paradoxically proceeded by becoming smaller.102 If there is a type of reassembly taking place in such implosion and compression, it does not easily square with McLuhan’s optimistic vision of an electronically reintegrated global community. The bubbles, capsules, and satellite signals may be seen as liberating prosthetic assemblages, yet they hint darkly that this liberation was a more complete dependency on mediating apparatuses. The assembly envisioned was less a sudden recombination of the fragments of media history into a new whole than a composite sensory bubble animated by a restless plugging and replugging. Hollein’s preoccupation with the symbolism of the technological infrastructures of communication and supply systems (Versorgung) appears in a satirical portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson assembled as an oil refinery—­an image taken from the American radical magazine Ramparts and juxtaposed with the ancient astronomical observatory at Jaipur.103 Versorgung can refer to physical infrastructure or aspects of it, such as electrical wiring, but also to support, maintenance, feeding, and care. One of the final spreads shows a set of commemorative stamps bearing an astronaut tethered to his capsule, along with a NASA diagram of the supply systems that support his life. These were juxtaposed with a full-­page image of Mars, though one not immediately recognizable as such. Rather than a photograph, the reader confronted a sequence of zeros and ones, a fragment of the binary code sent back to earth by the Mariner IV satellite. Digitized image transmission interrupts the sequence of recognizable icons and signs, like an irruption of the numerical infrastructure supporting the circulation of visual similarities and metaphorical substitutions. The desire to expand architecture’s boundaries shares something of the paradoxical scale of information transmission, expanding to encompass ever greater distances as it gets physically compressed. Toward the middle of the montage sequence, roughly midway between the oil refinery and the binary code, a PVC bubble appears. In a sequence of photographs a soft, crumpled form emerges from a window and expands into a sphere, hovering in the space of the street without any apparent support, itself an echo of the dilating rhythm of “Everything Is Architecture.” The

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same form reappears on the next spread juxtaposed with a Svobodair spray can from which it might have emerged. Both images document Haus-­Rucker Co.’s project Ballon für Zwei, a pneumatically and electrically supported “capsule” that made a sudden appearance on Vienna’s streetscape in 1967. Like the capsules taking astronauts into orbit, the energy supply, or Versorgung, of Haus-­Rucker Co.’s capsule was hidden behind its back—­in this case, a counter­weight and humble vacuum cleaner. Yet Ballon für Zwei also recalled the simul-­station described by Johansen, physically projecting its occupants out into the street while filtering their perception through a low-­definition, translucent, plastic screen-­membrane.104 The exterior of this bubble-­mosaic doubled as an urban signal to passersby, announcing the circulation of energies hidden within. If such a projection aligned architecture with the extension of the human sphere, the subjects at the center of these ephemeral and bodily-­scaled spaces were more literally dependent, relying on a coordinated assemblage of air, nutrition, and electricity to function. The isolation offered by the bubble supported a curious space for public intimacy; the support it offered was not only the physical cantilever but the altered atmospheric, acoustic, and haptic qualities of the isolation chamber itself.105 This more total dependence was paradoxically hailed as liberation. Hollein’s text similarly speculated about architecture’s material dissolution and disappearance, envisioning “nonmaterial means” of environmental determination including the use of lasers, temperature, smell, and most famously his environmental control pill.106 Here supply shifts registers, from the literal dependence on the Versorgung of life-­supporting functions to psychological and emotional Versorgung, the support system allowing a subject to navigate the world via the medium of his or her senses. Here architecture merges more subtly with the subject’s psychic independence, testing one’s ability to distance the assaults that the nervous system must repel in order to maintain coherence in relation to the onslaught of the external world. Hollein and Pichler experimented with their own architecture of encapsulation during these years, projects in which the vectors of explosive extension and implosive compression come sharply into collision. Hollein’s Mobile Office—­a transparent, pneumatic PVC cylinder furnished with telephone, typewriter, and drafting board—­was an architectural capsule designed for television broadcast, realized in conjunction with an episode on Hollein for Austrian television in 1969.107 The architect is seen on the grass fringes of an airport runway, presumably hard at work between flights. Mobile Office staged a prescient image of the expansion and deterritoriali­zation of work, an absurd combination of freedom of movement with isolation, in which the 174 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

architect remains connected by being sealed off inside a bubble. The playfulness of Hollein’s Mobile Office barely hints at the darker side of this deterritorialization, in which implosion tips over into immobilization and paraly­sis. Such motifs were more starkly articulated in Hollein and Pichler’s earlier proposal for a Minimal Environment (Minimalumwelt) at the 1965 Paris Biennial. Appropriating the existing typology of the telephone booth, they repurposed it as “the representation of a new architecture, enormously extended through communications media.”108 “The existing telephone booth,” they declared, “should be transformed into an autarchic unit, through the installation of various furnishings necessary to physical and psychic life.”109 The transformed booth was to provide nutrition, feces removal, air conditioning, as well as light, sound, television, taste, smell, mood conditioning, simulated situations, and connections with other units. Hollein and Pichler’s re-­envisioning of this stock urban element highlighted the ambivalence of architecture’s extension into an assemblage of media networks. The projection and “enormous extension” of the subject was explicitly imagined through a device of isolation and immobilization reminiscent of the operant conditioning chambers developed by the experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner, used to monitor the behavior of confined experimental subjects exposed to a range of sensory stimuli. Pichler further developed a darkly comic vision of such “extensions of man” through a series of sculptures known as the Prototypes (1966–­67), projects such as Portable Living Room (1967), Intensiv-­box (1967), and Kleiner Raum (1967), the last of which Archigram collaged into its definition of emancipation in the magazine’s eighth issue in 1968. In such prototypes, the mediated supplementation of consciousness was rendered as a sculpturally prosthetic merger of object and human body. The fascination with autarchic isolation became conjoined with different head-­mounted telecommunications apparatus to realize a more completely immersive experience of audiovisual media. If devices for perceptual isolation had once been aligned with concentration and productivity, in Pichler’s prototypes they appear uncomfortably conjoined with a more intimate connection with audiovisual communications networks.110 Such apparatuses fascinated Pichler’s friend, the author Oswald Wiener, who pushed the dynamics of physical isolation and virtual immersion to a gruesome extreme in his writings. The appendix to his experimental novel Die Verbesserung von Mittel­ europa (The Improvement of Middle Europe) elaborated a scenario in which Pichler’s proto­types were cast as “bio-­adapters,” mechanisms of captivation that initiated a process in which the limbs of a wired subject were progressively anaesthetized and amputated.111 175 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.26. Hans Hollein, Mobile Office, 1969. PVC, electric air pump (or vacuum cleaner), typewriter (Hermes Baby), telephone, drafting board, pencil, eraser, thumbtacks, artificial turf, 225 × 120 cm. Photograph by Werner Kaligofsky. Copyright Sammlung Generali Foundation. Permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

Nothing quite as extreme as Wiener’s “bio-­adapter” appears in Hollein’s manifesto, yet intimations of amputation and collapse flash up toward the end of “Everything Is Architecture.” The sudden expansion of Balloon für Zwei is followed by one of Lucas Samaras’s mirrored rooms, in which the motif of implosion appears through the illusory mise-­en-­abyme of facing reflections. The image sits above the dark scribbles of Arnulf Rainer’s proposal for Vienna’s iconic Votivkirche (1879), in which the landmark is progressively obliterated by a dense accumulation of lines. This overwriting of architecture continues on the next page, in the form of a messy field in which the littered streets of New York City, paralyzed by a garbage strike, appear above the littered surfaces of a Materialaktion performance by Otto Mühl. Feet, fingers, arms, and faces protrude through the surface of a sheet. Detached from a familiar body image, the limbs and digits appear like disjecta membra, abjectly mixed together with slices of meat, packets of cigarettes, fluids, and vegetables. Here the ecstatic possibilities foreseen in the ability to make architecture more perfect and total by becoming more miniature, ephemeral,

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FIGURE 3.27. Walter Pichler, TV Helm, Portable Living Room, 1967. Polyester, varnished white, integrated TV monitor with TV connection, 59 × 120 × 43 cm.

and disappearing suggest a link to impulses that are destructive, even self-­ destructive. This ambivalent relation is suggested by a vestigial linguistic rhyme: the Materialaktion of Mühl and the “Streik der Mullabfuhr” (garbage strike). Here the mirage of individual liberation comes unhinged from wider mechanisms of social integration, and desublimation threatens the coherence of the symbolic structure with disintegration and collapse.

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Media Lines The declaration “everything is architecture” may be indelibly associated with Hollein, but such a statement is neither singular nor timeless. The manner in which architects have envisioned “everything” changes with different historical moments. Le Corbusier had already declared “tout est architecture” in 1931, notably in a reflection on film, the most advanced communication medium of his day. For Le Corbusier, “everything was architecture” to the extent that it was “ordered or arranged according to proportions.”112 The “spirit of truth” shared by architecture and film was grounded in an abstract, idealist, and classicizing faith in architecture as the correct organization of forms according to transcendental mathematical laws. Hollein’s “everything” cut itself loose from such transcendentals, sustained less by a faith in order and proportion than by a confident assertion of architecture’s ability to appropriate anything. This expansive vision of architecture as an open-­ended medium was coupled with the claim that “everyone is an architect.” If the discipline was liberated to appropriate everything, the reverse was also true; anyone was entitled to appropriate the position of the architect.113 This twofold claim marks a moment of change in the terms of architectural authority: from the architect’s role as an articulator of formal and symbolic order toward a conception of architecture as a situated performance. There was an affinity between Hollein’s effort to reframe architecture as a communication medium and his earliest commissions, which required an explicit engagement with problems of exhibition and display. In the Retti and Metek boutiques, and the Austriennale, mediation was foregrounded in the making of ambiguous signs that also functioned as things to be looked through. At the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York, it could appear as a structural element clad with a distorting reflection, as the blank facade of the townhouse, reminiscent of Loos, sat propped on a chromed double column reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Mylar clouds. The more extreme metonymy found in “everything is architecture” called for a different articulation of media, one that appears more clearly in Hollein’s designs for public spaces at the beginning of the 1970s, hybrid media assemblages that he termed “environmental conditioning systems.” These took the form of a series of competition submissions, the first of which was submitted to a competition organized by the chemical giant BASF in 1969 for a plaza in Ludwigshafen. At the south end of the plaza, an enlarged, climbable “media spine” anchored a network of points that extended out into public space as a climatic conditioning system. In 1971 he proposed a related public lighting and climate-­control system for 178 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.28. Hans

Hollein, Richard Feigen Gallery, New York, 1967–­69. Photograph by Evelyn Hofer. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

a competition for Vienna’s city hall square. Later that year Hollein envisioned an even more extensive system for the 1972 Munich Olympics and finally won the competition. The Media Lines, as the project was called, found an opening for itself within what was perhaps the most formidable media operation mounted in postwar Germany. The 1972 summer Olympics were designed to broadcast 179 EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE

FIGURE 3.29. Hans Hollein, “Media Spine.” Competition entry, Ludwigshafen, 1969. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

an image of a reformed, open, progressive, and technologically advanced West Germany, underlining its difference both from the Communist East and from the monumental Fascist celebrations of the 1936 games in Berlin.114 The message of openness, lightness, and inclusiveness was central to the architecture of the games, from the sprawling airy meshwork of Frei Otto and Gunther Behnisch’s tensile canopy, gathering up the various sites, to the loose, mixed-­use hierarchy of the Olympic village, reminiscent of progressive Team 10 planning ideas. It is telling that Otl Aicher’s official poster for the games distills this openness into an image about architecture and communication; we see no athletes, or humans of any kind, no colors or symbols that might connote “Germanness” (Plate 26). The stylized curves of tension nets flow from the background to the foreground; as they shoot toward the picture plane one can no longer tell if they are architecture or waves emanating from the television transmission tower in the distance. Transparency is signified as a relationship among particles, but these are rendered no longer in terms of shadow and reflection but as the flickering linear pattern of a cathode ray tube. The TV tower was not incidental: Munich was to be the first games broadcast in color via satellite in its entirety.115 Even the Bundes­ polizei swapped their normal dark green uniforms for specially designed “sky blue” suits, and rather than weapons, they carried conspicuous walkie-­ talkies, broadcasting an image of security that depended on wireless communication rather than ballistics. Hollein’s Media Lines—­a similarly diffuse, user-­oriented, flexible, and colorful intervention—­had finally found its opening. Just the kind of thing for this peculiar type of global village. The Media Lines were an almost two-­kilometer-­long linear network built from repurposed infrastructural tubing mounted on steel supports, color-­

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coded and wired with lighting and capable of supporting a variant electrical load. The lines were a medium for channeling flows of athletes, journalists, coaches, delegates, and tourists in and out of the “forum zone” of the Olympic Village. More important, this ostensible wayfinding element was a sprawling plug-­in system, designed to channel diverse flows of media reminiscent of Hollein’s “Everything,” an open system that visitors and villagers could manipulate and rearrange. These included spotlights, loudspeakers, apparatuses for slide and film projection, television monitors connected to a closed-­circuit broadcast system, infrared heating units, cool-­air exhaust ducts, mist curtains, movable information panels, advertisements, sun shades, fiber-­glass rain canopies, roll-­down partitions, and a type of rail-­mounted chair that never materialized (Plate 27). This diverse and implicitly endless range of media was described by Hollein as a high-­tech Ariadne’s thread. Its consistency, however, was less that of a thread than of an electronic circuit. What the Media Lines sought to appropriate was the logic of this circuit-­network, re-­envisioning and materializing it in the form of a polychromatic civic infrastructure. The Media Lines were a theoretically centerless system defined by its points of connection, nodes that enabled the line to branch onto other media distribution systems, rather than by its physical beginning or end points. In such a vision, the particular qualities of a place mattered less than the ways these might be redefined and modified by devices plugged into this network. As the thread becomes a circuit, it threatens to turn into a different kind of labyrinth. The Media Lines have largely been overshadowed in Hollein’s reception and in histories of the period. Indeed, the Media Lines, like the games themselves, have become indelibly bound to the events of September 5, 1972, when the PLO-­affiliated terror cell Black September took hostage, and eventually murdered, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team. In retrospect, the very flexibility and porousness designed into this Olympic image were what provided the opportunity for the attack. The media systems wired into the Olympic site were crucial; the horrific events of September 5 became the first terror attack to be broadcast in “real time” on television around the globe via satellite.116 The events in Munich opened onto a new, far more media-­savvy wave of terrorism, which explicitly understood its actions in terms of global audiovisual dissemination. The more optimistic moments of “Everything Is Architecture” and of Hollein’s Media Lines could not escape the event horizon of what came to be called the Munich massacre. In this sense, we might see the stripped and partly dismantled Lines preserved in Munich as a poignant relic and a reminder of the volatility of this media environment (Plate 28).

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FIGURE 3.30. Hans

Hollein, Media Lines, Olympic Village, Munich, 1972. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

The flexible, open network of the Media Lines was one of the last inheritors in a series of projects (Constant’s New Babylon, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Archigram’s Instant City) that envisioned the appropriation and transfer of communications media as a line of flight, however temporary and provisional, from the routine pressures of social determination. The confident, distributed, and flexible expansiveness of the Media Lines, like that of “Every­ thing Is Architecture,” experimented with just such a form of radical openness that became a target in 1972. After such an event, the faith that had been put in such openness came to seem misguided. The years after the Munich

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FIGURE 3.31. Hans Hollein, Media Lines, Olympic Village, Munich, 1972. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

Olympics witnessed a sea change in thinking about architecture and about media; the themes of expansion, reassembly, and indeterminacy that had dominated only a few years earlier were displaced by efforts to comprehend simulacral closure, control, and technological determinism.117 Paradoxically, the very infrastructures that promised an ability to connect to “everything” and be everywhere were seen to produce an equally intense sense of vulnerability and loss of identity. How one thinks through the tension between these vectors remains one of the most salient question for thinking through the legacy of a project like the Media Lines and the assembly operations it mobilized.

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4

DISASSEMBLING PARIS Utopie circa 1968

For us, it will at first only be a matter of dismantling the economic, political, social, and cultural manifestations of architecture without making a manifesto. And then of attempting to penetrate—­through and beneath subjective appearances and ideological illusions—­the role and status of architecture, in order to apprehend our object as the product of a society. —Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique”

In a text published in the turbulent wake of May 1968, members of the Utopie group ventured a description of their task. At a moment saturated with declarations, programs, and platforms, the problem facing the field, they argued, was not another manifesto; rather, it was to gain a firmer theoretical grasp of architecture’s modes of appearance amid the rapid changes characteristic of postwar consumer society. The group sought to understand architecture’s status as a “product,” and in doing so, to grasp “the moments of transformation of a commodity called architecture in the course of its production at the heart of French society.”1 Decomposing the “commodity called architecture” promised to reveal the underlying logic that structured its making. The group’s analysis of architectural production during these years—­in writings, exhibitions, and designs—­both drew on, and in turn helped nourish, a critique of consumer culture, a project reflective of the group’s hybrid makeup, which was a combination of architects and sociologists. Compared with the work of Archigram or Hans Hollein, Utopie engaged more explicitly with questions of class, consumption, semiotics, and the politics of contemporary urban development. Yet like its peers, Utopie tended to see the problem of the commodity in terms of processes of mediation and change, what 185

the group’s members called “moments of transformation.” Such moments needed to be established theoretically, and “Architecture comme problème théorique” (“Architecture as a Theoretical Problem”) was one effort to do so. The group’s sprawling and heterodox deployment of montage techniques was central to this theoretical project. In the group’s work, a different facet of the period’s montage practice comes into focus, namely, how the putting-­ together of composite images paradoxically served as a way to reflect on processes of disassembly. The article “Architecture comme problème théorique” spread out over ten pages in the September 1968 issue of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, one of the largest-­circulation architectural magazines of its day. It was a tremendous amount of space for a small group of recently graduated architects and sociolo­ gists, whose output consisted of little more than an issue of their epony­mous magazine, a handful of designs, and an exhibition. Nor was such a polemi­cal article typical of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, a magazine whose editors emphasized reporting on new buildings over theoretical questions or disciplinary debates.2 At sixteen thousand words of demanding prose, “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem” was essentially a political pamphlet smuggled into the space of a glossy professional journal.3 Crucial to its publication were twin columns of montaged images that framed the text, confronting readers with a bewildering array of fragments. The visual field was one in which R. Buckminster Fuller’s United States Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67 confronted the vapor cloud of an atomic blast, in which mass-­produced flush toilets came together with “made to measure” mortgages, modular storage systems, popu­ lation graphs, advertisements for shopping malls, and propo­sals for the redevelopment of Les Halles. Extracted from glossy picture maga­zines, satirical newspapers, popular science journals, and the real estate press, working with and against contemporary media images was crucial to Utopie’s larger theoretical practice. The montages were aimed at what the group’s members imagined to be the visual repertoire of the maga­zine’s international readership, yet they also responded to a moment of crisis for architectural edu­cation: the occupation and dissolution that spring of Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-­Arts (ENSBA).4 Among the many issues at stake was how a post Beaux-Arts pedagogy would define architecture. Architecture, they argued, could no longer be understood as an “oeuvre” (work of art), a “creation,” or a “synthesis,” as the more conservative elements in the school maintained. Yet it did not suffice—­as emerging militant slogans within the ex-­Beaux-­Arts would have it—­to define architecture as “a service to the people” or simply as “a political act.”5 Utopie’s composite image fields, by contrast, scrambled and 186 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

reworked the materials and formats of contemporary advertising to insist on the role these played in urban processes of architectural production, a domain that they wanted both to make visible and to subject to theoretical disassembly. For all of Utopie’s interest in architecture as a product of social forces, the group resisted the simplified idea that architecture directly expressed the dominant mode of production. Rather, it was the manner in which architecture was “mediatized by systems of value, culture, and the aesthetic economy” that was of the greatest interest to the group.6 For this, moments of transformation rather than those of stasis appeared to be the most salient analytic terrain. Deciphering mass imagery and mass discourse by taking them apart was a central aspect of this theorization, one that aimed to come to grips with architecture’s place in a consumer society oriented by increasingly ephemeral and expendable media. While the group was committed to theory, this did not imply a rejection of practice. The effort to disassemble the images of consumer society was in constant dialogue with another type of disassembly; the group’s experimental designs for short-­lived, physically demountable structural systems. The concern for disassembly that pervaded the group’s writings and architectural work was paradoxically the very thing that enabled Utopie to hold the theoretical and the practical together during this brief period, a moment in which these dimensions of the discipline increasingly began to come apart. The rhetoric of disassembly, like much ideological critique at this moment, sought to grasp the cultural moment as a totality, from the technical rationality of mass production to the semiotic structure of postwar advertising, to the accelerated changes of the city’s urban fabric. Doing so meant rethinking architecture in the face of an uncertainty about its permanence, making temporal limitation and a logic of disassembly into central features of the architectural design problem. Utopie’s rhetoric of disassembly made frequent recourse to the verb démonter. Gentle or violent depending on the context, démonter can describe an object carefully removed from its pedestal or a rider violently thrown from a horse. Démontage recalls the broader emphasis on negation associated with the circulation of the prefix dé in artistic and intellectual culture in France during the 1960s, from the use of décollage to describe the practice of exhibiting torn billboards and advertisements by artists such as Raymond Hains to the Situationist International’s use of détournement to theorize the deliberate misappropriation of everyday materials. Yet démonter appears distinct from both these senses. Neither a conspicuous tearing of the image’s surface nor a deliberate program of misuse, it concerns the intricate task of dismantling, suggesting that ideology could be understood as a structure that might 187 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

be arrested by taking it apart. At the same time, a rhetoric of disassembly allowed the group to think construction in reverse—­envisioning structures designed to be dismantled. Such an ambiguity was essential to their experiments with lightweight, demountable architecture, a choice in stark contrast to the heavy industrialized building technologies that dominated the mass-­production housing in France during the 1960s.

Ephemeral Construction

FIGURE 4.1. Utopie, detail from “Architecture comme

problème théorique,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, September 1968. Copyright Utopie.

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The group’s interest in building with textiles, steel, and air was kindled amid the rapid changes of Paris’s urban landscape during the 1960s. The initial encounters that led to the group’s formation took place in 1966–­67, at the Tony Garnier semi­ nar at the École des Beaux-­Arts.7 It was in this seminar—­the only course in which students at the ENSBA could engage with problems of the city and urban planning—­that Jean Aubert, Jean-­Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco came into contact with Hubert Tonka, a teaching assistant for Henri Lefebvre at the Institut d’urbanisme de Paris.8 In addition to Aubert, Jungmann, Tonka, and Stinco, the group included Isabelle Auricoste; a landscape architect from the École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage, Versailles; Jean Baudrillard and René Lourau; assistants to Lefebvre in the Department of Sociology at Nanterre; and the journalist Catherine Cot. The preoccupation with demountable construction was closely tied to a particular segment of the École des Beaux-­Arts, the studio of Edouard Albert, where Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco met as students. An eccentric figure, Albert was a Beaux-­ Arts graduate of the 1930s who gravitated to structural rationalism and techniques of lightweight construction, problems that had been historically in the minority, when not outright opposed within

the Beaux-­Arts. Albert played a pivotal role in developing an architecture of tubular steel construction in buildings like the office of the Savings Bank of France (1958) and the Tour Croulebarbe (1961), which was the first housing tower to be constructed in Paris. Albert’s interest in lightweight structure was not strictly technical but reflected his interest in opening architecture more thoroughly to large-­scale void spaces. Croulebarbe featured a two-­story belvedere that occupied the entire sixth and seventh floors, an opening that was to connect the tower to the Avenue de la Soeur-­Rosalie to the north (an

FIGURE 4.2. École des

Beaux-­Arts occupied by students, Paris, June 1968. Copyright Roger Viollet / The Image Works.

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ambition scuttled by Parisian transport authorities late in the planning stage) and to offer a panoramic view of the city. Albert’s atelier included hundreds of students, and commonly invited guests, including such well-­known figures such as Jean Prouvé. One of the more liberal aspects of the Beaux-­Arts system was that it allowed students to elect outside professors, an opportunity that Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco took to invite David-­Georges Emmerich—­an architect even more radically committed to lightweight and impermanent tensile construction systems—­to help advise their thesis projects.9 FIGURE 4.3. Édouard Albert, with Robert Boileau, Jacques-­ Henri Labourdette, Tour Croulebarbe, Paris, 1961. Copyright Pavillon de l’Arsenal.

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Lightweight construction figures prominently in Aubert’s image-­text “Devenir surannée” (“Becoming Outmoded”), published in the first issue of the group’s journal. Cutting and pasting photographs and text fragments from magazines and books, Aubert configured an abbreviated visual atlas of demountable construction that mapped out an opposition between the ephemeral and the durable. Next to a diagrammatic account of the decreasing lifespan of consumer goods, the Crystal Palace appears to undergo a paral­lel dismantling, passing from a view of the completed exhibition hall to an image of its assembly, to a detail of the attachment system used in its beams. Aubert’s image-­tables cut directly from the Crystal Palace, the Galerie des Machines, and the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 World’s Fair—­incubators of both iron construction techniques and nineteenth-­century mass culture—­to Fuller’s postwar domes, Frei Otto’s canopies at Expo 67, and a host of theoretical projects from across the channel, including Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Archigram’s plug-­in capsules, and a dwelling tower by Arthur Quarmby.10 It was a selection that produced a strikingly different image of history, one in which the continuity of experiments in lightweight structure was achieved by radically editing out the development of the International Style during the interwar years.

FIGURE 4.4. Jean Aubert, pasteup and draft layout for “Devenir surannée” (“Becoming Out­ moded”), Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

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Aubert concluded his contribution by contrasting this collection of ephemeral constructions with a number of brutalist buildings then at the height of fashion. Marked out under the heading “durable,” these included Henry Bernard’s recently completed Maison de la Radio in Paris (1963), Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton, and Paul Koralek’s Chichester Theological College (1967), and the roughly textured surfaces of Paul Rudolph’s Endo Labora­tories (1964) and Yale Art and Architecture Building (1963).11 To these were added other icons: the ancient pyramid of Khafre at Giza, clippings from the magazine L’immobilier about a surplus of “unsold and unsellable” suburban apartments, and a section of Jean-­Claude Bernard’s Design for a Total-­City, awarded the ENSBA’s Rome Prize in 1964. The proximity between Bernard’s Total-­City and the outmoded apartments insinuated the perils of stylistic obsolescence, as much within the Beaux-­Arts as within the building industry.12 Looking closely at this field, however, one sees that it is arrayed around a different type of reference, less to solidity and monumentality than to destruction. At its center was a grainy image of the partly dismantled Gare Montparnasse, evocatively positioned next to the phrase “the long and difficult demolition of buildings built for eternity.” Montparnasse, like the markets of Baltard at Les Halles, was a site emblematic of the large-­scale urban demolitions reshaping Paris during the second half of the 1960s. The interest in demountable construction emerges against a backdrop of urban demolition, as an acute skepticism surrounding the norms of duraFIGURE 4.5. Jean

Aubert, page spread from “Devenir surannée” (“Becoming Outmoded”), Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

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ble construction arose in an era of intensified obsolescence. The ephemeral was the term that the architects’ erstwhile teacher, Emmerich, used to describe his own designs for lightweight structural systems. His conception of construction éphémère (ephemeral construction) appeared in his 1966 manifesto “Obstacles immuables” (“Immutable Obstacles”), a fragment of which Aubert pasted into his layout.13 The manifesto called for the “free development” of ephemeral construction unconstrained by “rules or norms.” On the surface, ephemeral construction combined structures that seemed as light and easy to disassemble as toys, yet Emmerich’s claims about these structures reveal a grander vision of transformation.14 Emmerich was committed to the idea that lightweight, industrialized components modeled on the rapid production and shortened lifespan of consumer goods were the most feasible way to provide more economical and flexible housing for the greatest number in the least amount of time. Rather than physical resistance to deterioration, it was the variability and flexibility of elements that were key to architecture’s survival in an era of rapid change and mobility. Something of the flavor of Emmerich’s vision can be seen in his project for the “Deltomobile,” a construction system that could serve to build vehicles as well as shelters.15 Contrasting the chassis of a traditional automobile to the lightweight strut system of his Deltomobile, Emmerich claimed the advantage of a design that was “silent, odorless, and light” while boasting exceptional variability: “By removing one strut,” he wrote, “the configuration can be changed . . . forming a smaller deltahedron. The operation can be repeated, continuing until the polyhedron disappears completely.”16 A project that demanded to be seen in time, the Deltomobile appeared to disassemble itself into a set of components in a quasi-­cinematic sequence of frames juxtaposed with an advertisement for a Parisian parking garage firm. “It is easier,” the architect argued, “to conjure away the car than a building.”17 As the title of Emmerich’s article, “Deltomobiles into Houses,” implied, ephemeral construction was not limited to taking apart. The vehicle’s struts were designed so that they could also be used for the construction of space frames and dome structures of varying dimensions. The demountable and transformable system, Emmerich claimed, was not only a remedy for the city; it ultimately aimed to retool industrial production itself, a demonstration of how “the conflict between the automobile and building industries could be replaced by a harmony of purpose.”18 A countersystem in nuce, for Emme­ rich ephemeral construction opposed the “decrepit durability” of buildings, by which he meant the bureaucratic processes of “agrément,” through which

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FIGURE 4.6. David-­

George Emmerich, page layout for “Char­ rettes!” Architecture mouvement continuité, November 1967. The article includes Emmerich’s design for a demountable “Deltomobile” at lower left.

materials were approved for use in construction.19 Not content with the object alone, the discourse of ephemeral construction aimed to dismantle the idea of permanence governing such building norms. While seemingly modest and inconspicuous when contrasted to the bold concrete masses of contemporaneous brutalist buildings, such lightweight demountable architecture actually harbored a grander ambition: to design architecture’s own cycles of obsolescence at a moment of accelerated and uncertain urban change. The recurring specter of demolition within Utopie marks an important difference between its interest in the ephemeral and other contemporary reflections on obsolescence, the most influential of which were those spurred by London’s Independent Group (IG) a decade earlier.20 The IG valorized obsolescence through the lens of expendability; the turn toward the greater impermanence of objects and images was seen as an inevitable and potentially liberating quality of modernization. As formulated by McHale, the extensive consumption of expendable images conveyed by print, film, and television usurped the role of the fine arts as something that “enabled man to locate in, and deal with, his environment.”21 Orientation now took place through an iconographic grasp of continually shifting “expendable ikons,” which were used to contend with “the requirements of constant change, fleeting impressions, and a high rate of obsolescence.”22 Like his colleagues, Alison

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and Peter Smithson and Richard Hamilton, McHale collected advertisements rather than things. The ability to appropriate and reassemble images of starlets, screens, automobiles, and science fiction creatures was its own particular skill, establishing visual practices and conceptual themes that would mark architectural culture well into the 1960s. The recurring emphasis on the ephemeral in Utopie tapped into a parallel yet different strand of criticism, which, from the writings of Charles Baudelaire through to those of the surrealists, and the situationists, held a more ambivalent relationship to the passing, fugitive, and temporary aspects of modernity. The new aesthetic potentialities that arose from the intensified circulation of crowds and commodities in Paris’s modernized urban spaces were inextricable from a sense of destruction and loss. Baudrillard’s text on obsolescence in the first issue—­ which was printed next to Aubert’s visual tables—­shared in this legacy. The opposition between the durable and the ephemeral was neither inevitable nor a set of “absolute” values, nor even properties of things, but a “logic of cultural signification” central to the emerging “socio-­culture class system” of the 1960s.23 With such a logic, Baudrillard argued, the ephemeral was becoming autonomous from the durable, its meaning no longer in tension with the stable and the enduring. The drive toward accelerated change and disposa­ bility, he argued, was less a new means of orientation than a new form of distinction, a “model of cultural superiority” that could be actualized only by the new bourgeoisie.24 The conflicting visions of the ephemeral playing out in the pages of Utopie pointed to a lack of consensus within the group about the intensified trend toward impermanence in the 1960s, highlighting the controversial position of flexible, lightweight industrialized construction. Ephemeral construction, and in particular the figure of Emmerich, became a flashpoint during the occupation of the École des Beaux-­Arts in the spring of 1968, marking a rift among the various leftist factions within the school. In such a climate the tensions between architectural experimentation and militant politics surfaced violently.25 The architects of Utopie found themselves with a foot in both camps. Aubert recalled being targeted by a Maoist student group espousing direct action, which organized a general assembly at the ex-­ENSBA with the mocking title: “Are we fighting for inflatables?”26 Jungmann recalled that books by Emmerich were burned in the school’s courtyard.27 Whether apocryphal or not, a tract from the period, signed by the Comité Vide Ordures (Garbage Removal Committee) succinctly captures the violent bodily rheto­ ric of the period’s militant discourse.28 It was precisely Emmerich’s grand

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FIGURE 4.7. Comité

Vide-­Ordures, “Cassons les prix,” circa 1968. Tract. Courtesy Utopie Archive, Theil-­Rabier.

industrial vision that raised the ire of the Garbage Removal Committee. Juxtaposing an image of Emmerich’s experimental constructions with détourned comics, the pamphlet declared: “We shit on the content . . . we puke on the reasoning. This reasoning that . . . seeks to make us the guard dogs of capitalism, useful to [Emmerich] . . . as soon as he is able to manufacture housing as if it were hair curlers.”29 196 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

Industrial Styling Hair curlers were precisely the type of cheap, industrially produced, plastic commodities that flooded French markets during the decades of rapid postwar growth remembered as “les trentes glorieuses.” Such industrial production was at the center of Stinco’s contribution to the first issue, which reflected on the rapid turnover of styles in art, architecture, and industrial design. Stinco assembled his article by clipping images from journals of industrial aesthetics, art magazines like Domus and Art International, furniture exhibition catalogs, fashion reviews, and illustrated weeklies, embedding these with blocks of text extracted from the writings of historians such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Pierre Francastel, and Arnold Hauser.30 The sequence of pages offered a narrative less of progress than of simultaneous appearance, in which objects of art and design were tempered with the recurring presence of automobiles and other mass-­produced commodities. These ranged from iconic designs—­a 1964 Ford Thunderbird and the latest Citroen D/S—­to a range of parts, at times scarcely discernible, including stacks of bumpers, piles of handles, and chassis moving along an assembly line. The prominence of such automobiles on Stinco’s pages recalls the privi­ leged place that automobiles had enjoyed in architectural theory during the interwar years, most seminally, Le Corbusier’s juxtaposition of a Delage sports car with the Parthenon in the pages of L’esprit nouveau forty years earlier. The automobiles in Utopie bore little visual resemblance to such polemical juxtapositions or to Le Corbusier’s claims about the perfectibility of the machine age’s standardized forms. In Stinco’s essay, the automobile appeared less as an ideal industrial type than as emblematic of the intensified mutability of postwar industrial commodities. In the late 1940s, Sigfried Giedion’s Mecha­ nization Takes Command had already significantly shifted the discussion of industrial production, turning attention away from questions of external form to focus on automation and assembly. Writing about the automation of Ford’s assembly line, Giedion highlighted how perfecting techniques of decomposition and reassembly vastly increased automobile production while practically eliminating human intervention in the process.31 He concluded his chapter on the assembly line on a cautionary note, juxtaposing a vast stockpile of automobile chassis with a row of hanging hog carcasses in a Chicago slaughterhouse. If the centrality of the automobile persisted in Stinco’s visual essay, the bilateral juxtaposition of images favored by Le Corbusier and Giedion did not. The products of the assembly line were not isolated but embedded in a larger landscape of objects, artworks, and institutions, a sprawl197 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.8. Charles-­

Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), page spread from “Des yeux qui ne voient pas . . .” Vers une architecture (1923). Courtesy BNF. Copyright F. L. C. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, 2017.

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ing techno-­cultural domain that ranged from Renaissance art to electronics and contemporary fashion. The pages put together by Stinco do not indicate any evident entry point; they offer no beginning or any clear path for reading them. The reader is confronted with a Ford Thunderbird, a sketch by Michelangelo, a version of Constantin Brancusi’s 1923 sculpture Bird in Space, a mass of curving forms identified as a pile of mass-­produced handles, and advertisements for Telefunken portable transistor radios and Phillishave electric razors. Among these were glimpses of female workers at an electronics assembly line, furniture by Joe Colombo, a Dutch oven by Raymond Loewy, and the “space race” fashions of Pierre Cardin. The juxtaposition of the Thunderbird with works by old masters stands out among the dense matrix of colliding elements. The collision was not envisioned by Stinco but cut from the pages of the Ford Book of

Styling, a full-­color, hardbound volume that laid out the corporation’s styling principles.32 A visual essay whose gamut ran from ancient chariots to the latest models on Ford’s drafting boards, the Ford Book of Styling portrayed the evolution of automotive form as finally reconciling the qualities of unique art objects with the availability of standardized mass-­production. Ford cars were promoted not solely as good manufacturing but as “good design,” akin to IBM Selectric typewriters, the Eameses’ 670 Lounge Chair, or Reed and Barton’s sterling silver. The book diagrammatically conveyed the evolution of Ford’s automobile bodies as a search for greater integration; the elimination of differences between components such as bumpers, headlights, wheel wells, and engine compartments was a transformation in which the assembled, mechanical appearance of prewar cars gave way to a curved and integrated shape that Ford dubbed “the unity of design.”33 Such unity of design changed not only the look of the car but the syntax of assembly, smoothing away evident joints and seams. Its graphic corollary was the smoothing of relationships between disparate images assembled from the history of art and design.34 Using carefully calculated visual rhymes to connect otherwise unrelated images and objects, the Ford Book of Styling appealed to the putative universality of design as a visual language, in which external resemblances were taken to reflect deeper similarities of form and aesthetic intention.35 It was just such compari­ sons that Stinco cut and pasted to form the pages of Utopie, extracting Ford’s juxtaposition of Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ (1604) with a stylist’s effort to create a feeling of visual motion in an otherwise static object through a composition of swirling lines.36 The styling guide provided a meta-­language for reading such smooth assemblages, narrating an idealized brand identity for Ford at the very moment that it grew into an increasingly complex and differ­entiated entity composed of an ever-­wider range of vehicles. Stinco’s montage was neither a celebration of styling as a new form of popular art—­a position influentially argued by Banham—­nor a rejection of commercial styling in favor of scientific design methods, the counterposition advocated by Tomás Maldonado and others at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm during these years.37 More than anything, the images in Stinco’s layout call to mind Roland Barthes’s reflections on the Citroen D/S from the late 1950s. The mythology surrounding the D/S was, for Barthes, not unlike that surrounding the “Frenchness” of Gothic cathedrals, which, precisely because they were the work of “unknown artists,” could stand for a nation or an epoch.38 The aura of the D/S lay not in power, size, or material richness but in “the junction of its components,” whose smoothness and perfection seemed beyond the capacity of human hands. The car’s mythic status hinged on 199 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.9. Antoine

Stinco, page spread from “Art? . . . !,” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

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assembly; as seams and bolts were displaced by dovetailed edges and plush gaskets, the result was a different type of montage, one premised on lightness and seemingly effortless connection, what Barthes described as “the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded, to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their marvelous form.”39 With its juxtapositions of automobiles, household goods, furniture, and works of art, the Ford Book of Styling suggested its own phenomenology of assembly, a world of objects and a corporation held together by “marvelous form.” Stinco’s visual atlas took up the visual rhetoric of such styling books, in order to take apart their visual rhymes and verbal directions. If such an arrangement descended from the tack-­board aesthetics popularized in the 1950s, it neither joined its components to form a pictorial tableau nor insisted on a dispassionate archival order of one thing after another.40 Rather, it dispersed the emphasis, hierarchy, and directionality characteristic of documents like the Ford Book of Styling. Automobiles, chairs, and appli-

ances found themselves in a more crowded and unstable field. No longer restricted to objects, it included assembly lines, schools, factories, cinemas, vacation resorts, and suburban “grandes ensembles.” Where the Ford Book used single words—­such as composition, color, drawing, and motion—­to control and direct the connotations of its visual juxtapositions, Stinco deliberately emphasized their sources as the shifting world of printed matter. Attached to fragments of headlines and journal citations, they appear not as illustrations but as clippings laid out on a table. Stinco’s atlas was decidedly provisional, one whose images appeared as if they might be recombined or substituted by others. It is in the gaps of Stinco’s layout—­punctuated by text of various kinds—­where this dispersal begins to take on weight. Lower­case text was pinned to the images, while bold uppercase text delivered fragmentary phrases that could be read only by laterally scanning across the field of the page; the lines that cross the layout with the 1964 Thunderbird read: “A New Formulation of the Ephemeral / A Forgetting of the Object’s Purpose / ­Deliberate Advertising Theme.”41 Yet the interactions between image and text

FIGURE 4.10. Jerome

Gould and Associates, page from The Ford Book of Styling, 1964.

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FIGURE 4.11. Antoine

Stinco, page spread from “Art? . . . !” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

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resist the denotative function of captions; rather, they foreground the dense mixture of reading and seeing, emulating the layout’s visual drift while complicating this movement. More than anything, Stinco’s words drew attention to the gaps between images, the residual space of the editing table where visual fragments were brought together.42 Such unfinished phrases—­more than identifiers, less than sentences—­inhabit the grid’s emptiness, but also subvert its neutrality, drawing attention to such blank spaces as the site where relations of similarity or difference will be articulated. The moments of collision and separation that structured Stinco’s page shifted the emphasis from industrial design to the larger problematic of industrial society. Immediately following Stinco’s contribution, the grid of auto­mobiles, furniture, artworks, and buildings that had outlined an emerging phenomenology of assembly collided with a dense vision of urban space: a composite view of automobiles in the clogged streets near the Gare Saint-­ Lazare (Plate 29). The urban montage was assembled by Tonka and is perhaps best seen in contrast to contemporaneous efforts to visualize an architecture of urban mobility, notably in the work of the Groupe d’études d’architecture mobile. GEAM cofounder Yona Friedman regularly produced urban photomontages to envision his conception of the “ville spatiale” (spatial city), an

elevated three-­dimensional superstructure that promised a more flexible arrangement of dwelling spaces and less destructive integration with the existing city. Such images used Paris as the photomechanical ground against which a new technical system appeared in stark contrast, promising a more coherent and fluid movement in streets disencumbered by an elevated architectural armature (Plate 30).43 The visual density of Tonka’s montage was not strictly of an image of traffic but analogous to a traffic jam, envisioning blockage rather than flow. What at first appears to be a single street scene reveals itself on closer inspection to be a combination of two distinct photographs of streets near the Gare Saint-­Lazare. The emphasis on traffic in Tonka’s montage was closer to portrayals of the city found in contemporary cinema than to the projections of Friedman, such as the frustrated circulation that concluded Jacques Tati’s satirical take on the modernization of Paris. In the concluding shots of Playtime (1967), a colorful and dense throng of cars and buses caught within a traffic circle comes to appear as an absurd fairground carousel (Plate 31).44 Tonka’s traffic jam, moreover, did not allow for any binary relationship between foreground and background; rather, several smaller photographic details interrupted the impression of a singular scene and provided fleeting glimpses into discontinuous spaces. In one, an Austin mini sits partly disassembled at a repair shop; in another, advertisements accumulate on hoardings; in a third, reflections appear in a windscreen. In such fragments, the circulation of commodities and images collides with the physi­cal circulation of people. Without a secure opposition between closeness and distance, the stability of perspectival projection breaks down; the viewer’s gaze moves between disjunctive views, prying them out of the density of the photomechanical surface. A block of text at the foot of the page contrasted the rapid pace of technical development with that of contemporary archi­tecture and urbanism: “Apart from the object and its mobile, ephemeral aspect, the problems [of industrialization] present themselves completely upside down: despite the technologies available to us . . . we remain at the stage of coarse productions and distant prospects.”45 For the most optimistic enthusiasts of industrialized architecture, like Friedman and his colleagues in the GEAM, the promise of new techniques of mass production was precisely that of greater mobilité—­not only literal movement but also flexibility, cultural changeability, and class mobility. Tonka’s Gare Saint-­Lazare was an assemblage in which mobility appeared “upside down,” less versatility and fluid movement than stoppage and inflexibility; it pointed not to the fulfillment of the promises of mobilité but to their lack.46

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Repression The effort to visualize the city otherwise also motivated Tonka and René Lourau’s contribution to the first issue of Utopie. Titled simply “La répression,” the pages presented an urban condition that needed to be teased out from a dense commingling of sunglasses, vinyl raincoats, aerosol sprays, facades, housing complexes, and empty streets, among others.47 These are densely woven together with a heightened presence of printed words of various types, including slogans, headlines, transfer lettering, snippets of magazine articles, and columns of text. The columns of text were the only thing on the page whose indication of origin was cited. Cut from Liaisons, an obscure journal edited by the Parisian municipal police, they detailed new initiatives in urban policing, such as the clearing of “Beatniks” from the streets of the Left Bank in the summer of 1966.48 The gaps between image fragments carefully maintained by Aubert and Stinco are closed in “La r­ épression,” which conveyed a visual pressure through the density of elements on the page. The result, again, was a type of visual–­verbal mosaic, yet of a very different kind. It was structured neither by resemblances and pseudosimilarities nor by a logic of information flow; rather, it presented a hybrid form of image-­writing conversant with notions of écriture drawn from structuralist criticism, on the one hand, and with do-­it-­yourself processes of layout associated with the emerging free press, on the other.49 Such pages implied a process of meaning production that was skeptical of the logic of a unified, individual author, exploring instead the meaning-­ effects produced by altering and recombining preexisting elements of mass communication. If Tonka and Lourau’s graphic disassembly had an eye toward contemporaneous semiological theories of the image, the organization of such spreads was also informed by their particular mode of production. Utopie’s densely populated pages were reproduced through photo-­offset lithography, and the surviving pasteups and production materials provide an intriguing window into the logic of their construction. The cutting and pasting of images into strips was organized in two layers. Material to be reproduced in black and white was captured on one screen, and material to include gradations of gray captured on a separate halftone screen. The form of the separation was coordinated around negative spaces in the pasteups. A strong practical motivation was evident: separating out and ganging up halftones on a single film that could be composited manually by the printer was highly economi-

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cal. Yet an important semantic dimension also informed this difference—­the halftone process was reserved for photographs Tonka had taken in housing complexes on the outskirts of Paris, where he and Auricoste were living at the time. Unlike the optical superimposition of layers that appeared in the first two chapters, here layering does not manifest through physical overlay but through a subtle friction and contrast between the texture of the advertisements, slogans, and logos (in black and white) and the empty spaces reserved for the city (in halftone), which were printed in positive or negative, and placed in different orientations. This consciousness of the different optical layers within offset lithography was articulated in ways reminiscent of semiotically informed theories of the image that were developed during the same period. In his landmark 1964 essay, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes elaborated a theory of the image as an internally layered field, one whose formal structure could be decomposed through the semiological categories used to study language.50 Barthes argued that advertising images operated through layered messages, defined by the particular interaction of denotative and connotative signs.51 The connotative, polysemic density of the image, he argued, was like “an architecture of signs drawn from a variable depth of lexicons.”52 Such an “architecture of signs,” he noted, was composed of the interaction of discontinuous connotators—­shapes, colors, and surface textures—­which were like “erratic blocks [blocs érratiques], at once isolated and mounted into a general scene” by the apparatus of denotation.53 Barthes’s reference to architecture was not entirely haphazard; his description of connotation and denotation reworked a distinction that Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology had also explained via an architectural analogy.54 The essential relationship between syntagmatic combination (signs isolated and mounted into a given sequence) and paradigmatic selection (the possible substitution of similar, yet absent terms) was analogous, Saussure argued, to the way a classical facade assembled contigu­ ous relations, such as those between base, column, capital, and architrave, with principles of selection, the manner in which the choice of a particular order evoked the possible substitution of different orders. With Barthes’s structural analysis, something as banal as a tomato sauce advertisement came to appear as the manifestation of a more general ideological edifice, a structure in which the dispersive, discontinuous, and erratic connotative density of the image was made to perform denotatively, fixed, and mounted in place like a facade.

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FIGURE 4.12. Hubert Tonka, page spread for “La répression,” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

FIGURE 4.13. Hubert Tonka, pasteup and Ozalid proof of photographs used in “La répression,” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Printed paper and correction fluid on board. Copyright Utopie.

The pages of “La répression,” by contrast, scramble such polarized structures. A logo of links in a chain, dubbed a “chaîne magique” (magic chain), appears next to the abstract image of a knot—­the Woolmark logotype designed in 1966—­whose contrasting curves in turn appear next to the black-­and-­white silhouette of a woman with a novel commodity at the time: aerosol deodorant. This aerosol link carries over in the reference to “combinés,” a term that can refer to the two-­piece corselet pictured above, but also to devices such as telephone handsets and receivers. The contiguous circuit continues in the form of arrows pointing in opposite directions, indicating “how to transform the fashions of 65 into 66.” Farther down the page, the word ville straddles the seam between “suspenders that won’t slacken” and a movable gantry crane, the type of industrial technology that had been central to the work of Cedric Price during these years. While the visual blocks remain side by side, their seams are traversed by another layer: transfer lettering. Unlike the images and the text fragments cut from other sources, these transfer letters use imperative verbs: “placez et retirez” (to stick and remove), “frottez” (to rub), “facile à manipuler” (easy to handle), “à décalquer” (to transfer). Such floating imperatives echoed the incitements attached to new products, but also pointed to the bodily movements through which pages were constructed. Throughout, a connotative and associative reading links industrialized mass housing to social bonds as well as to industrial materials in accessories and mass-­produced ready-­to-­wear clothing, itself a new relatively phenomenon in 1967.55 What were so many everyday commodities doing on such a page, together with the women’s bodies used to advertise them? It might appear at first glance that Tonka and Lourau were echoing the derisive remarks about hair curlers found in the militant pamphlets that would emerge from the ex-École des Beaux-­Arts in 1968. Such militant speech seized on a new type of plastic commodity to serve as a synecdoche for industrial mass-­production, and in doing so it reactivated a much older trope associated with modernism. It was one that, as Andreas Huyssen has analyzed, associated the threat of industrial mass culture with feminization.56 The repetition of female bodies and silhouettes in Tonka and Lourau’s visual essay remains ambiguous, and not unproblematic from a contemporary standpoint. Yet it would be a mistake to see them as asserting the feminizing effects of mass culture or merely as reflections of general sexist currents during these years. Tonka and Lourau’s pages, after all, targeted contemporary forms of repressive policing, and the silhouettes and figures drawn from contemporary advertisements might be read as aspects of such a repressive regime. Tonka, in particular, would 210 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

have been familiar with the regular use of pinups and advertisements within the pages of the Internationale Situationniste (IS). Such détourned icons, as Kelly Baum has argued, took the pinup as an emblem of the pervasive aliena­ tion of desire within postwar capitalism.57 Utopie was certainly indebted to the IS’s criticism of urbanism and its tactics of détournement, yet it was also distinct from the IS in important ways.58 Tonka helped found Utopie after having turned down an overture from members of the IS, and the magazine’s dialogic format was itself a response to the more monolithic organization of the IS.59 The IS’s détournement proceeded by changing an image’s caption; altering the meaning of an image depended on retaining a conventional relationship of text and illustration. Tonka and Lourau’s “La répression” emphatically avoided the conventions of illustration and broke up the authority of word over image. Nor did they allow any perspectival coherence to domi­ nate, or any meta-­figure to emerge from the conjoining and overlapping of image fragments. Utopie’s scrambling of the relationships between word and image exceeded anything the IS would countenance. “La répression” took familiar signifying materials apart and put them back together in ways that exacerbated the play of connotation against the denotative structures used by advertising to contain the proliferation of associations. The result extended the connotative charge of all manner of liaisons, from the information chains of urban policing to images of suspenders and clip bras, to the patterned facades of industrial buildings, highway clover-­leafs, and the cables of movable cranes.60 Signs were not isolated and mounted so as to reliably denote a particular referent; rather, images detached from disparate sources joined together to form block-­like arrangements. Language no longer holds the image—­“like a vise,” in Barthes’s words—­but has become discontinuous, so many “erratic blocks” forming a visual surface. Despite the critique of repression, the women included on the page remained images and surfaces, rather than agents. Yet the bodies, sprays, labels, and commodities whose connotations Tonka and Lourau scrambled were something other than a general critique of the alienation of desire. Drawn largely from the magazine Elle, they were an effort to disassemble the visual and verbal rhetoric about suburban expansion advanced by such glossy magazines at the time. Beginning in 1966, Elle embarked on a yearlong reportage on new towns constructed around Paris’s suburbs. Elle’s recurring tagline from this reportage—­“Découvrez comment vivent les villes inventées” (Discover how one lives in invented cities)—­appeared at the center of one of Tonka and Lourau’s pages, cast amid other slogans referencing class struggle as well as the short-­lived “Provo” movement that erupted in Amsterdam in 1966. Just 211 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.14.

Advertisement for “Youthcraft Americana Clip-­Bra,” Elle, January 1966. Courtesy BNF.

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as the connotation of Elle’s tagline gets dispersed, so does the magazine’s attempt to neutralize and direct the associations surrounding such suburban development, notably the effort to replace the stigmatized term grandes ensembles with the more desirable “invented cities.”61 In Utopie, the repeating lines of a facade echo the parallel slits appearing in a pair of disposable plastic sunglasses, itself part of a chain that includes the letters “PàP,” Elle’s logo for “prêt-­à-­porter” designs, which regularly incorporated new, cheap, and light materials such as vinyl, lycra, and PVC. One instance of such clothing was an advertisement for a “Youthcraft Americana Clip Bra,” which had been published in Elle next to a new high-­rise tower in Rosny-­sous-­Bois. A fragment of the advertisement appeared in Utopie, embedded in a cluster that included a suburban high-­rise tower, the smiling faces of a model couple, a child grasping for an object, and a detail of an industrial curtain wall. Such an attachment would have resonated with Banham’s contemporaneous notion of clip-­on architecture, examined in chapter 1. It promised an open-­ended, flexible, and promiscuous relationship between environmental technologies, power sources, and building components that was dependent on forms of disconnection and cutting out associated with processes of print production in offset lithography.62 A process of disconnection and reattachment that was decidedly open-­ended and temporary, “clipping” promised promiscuous assemblies without fixed relations. Placed amid towers and curtain walls, such an advertisement highlights that the clip was less a component than a period connotator for the promise of ready-­made connections, one that could be applied to undergarments, outboard motors, or building components. The undergarments and suburban towers that appeared on the pages of Elle remained clearly segregated by a vertical line separating advertisement from editorial content. It is this line that “La répression” dismantled, collapsing the artificial distance between such extraneous elements into a new and unstable visual density. Dismantling the clear separation between advertising and urban reportage also altered the city’s image, insinuating a

condition in which mechanisms of repression could no longer be identified in quite the same way. On the one hand, such a collapsed condition could appear as one in which a building or street was no more important than the disposable sprays, clips, logos, and ready-­to-­wear clothing that closed in around them. In “La répression,” the city is only ever glimpsed fleetingly, the glimpses of streets subsumed within a shifting field of signs, products, and advertisements recalls Jean-­Luc Godard’s contemporaneous film Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967). Godard too used connotation as an absent center; the feminine pronoun elle in the film’s title was identified with a shifting set of referents without being reduced to any one of them. These ranged from the city of Paris (la ville) to the vast anonymity of suburban housing complexes (la banlieue), and from the film’s female lead, who takes up part-­time prostitution to make rent, to the lushly colored shots of “la marchandise” that recur throughout the film. René Ferracci’s poster for the film might have been fresh in Tonka and Lourau’s memory; it featured a montage combining many of the same elements populating their pages, from soap ads and logos to body parts extracted from fashion advertisements and the repetitive facades of grandes ensembles. Whereas the connotative density of Ferracci’s montage reassuringly asserts the centrality of the film’s female lead, Marina

FIGURE 4.15. Hubert Tonka, page spread for “La répression,” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967). Copyright Utopie.

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Vlady, whose face confronts the viewer as if through a torn screen, Tonka and Lourau’s pages pursue the opposite direction. Dispensing with centralizing hierarchy in favor of a centrifugal extension, their image writing emphasized the peripheral, both in the sense of the banlieue and in the sense of the quotidian and the contingent. This seemingly centerless assemblage was held together by the proliferation of ambiguous connotative relations associated FIGURE 4.16. René Ferracci, poster for Jean-­Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle . . . , 1966. Copyright 2017 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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with a masculine gaze. The texture of their montage nonetheless reasserted a significant, if subtle, visual friction borne of technical distinction: between images reproduced in black and white and those reproduced in tones of gray. This technical distinction differentiated commodities and signs from views of the city and the suburbs by associating them with distinct optical registers. The result was a composite and paradoxical image of the urban condition, in which the city and the world of commodities and signs remained at an uncertain distance from each other even as they appeared more densely entwined within a single continuous surface.

Monumental Windbags The concern for connection and detachment, coherence and rupture, evident in the group’s approach to the pages of its journal was thoroughly architectural, and provides a way to reread the particular manner in which Utopie turned toward problems of construction during these years. It is not insignifi­ cant that the earliest collaborations among the group’s architects was for an international competition for industrially produced mass housing. From the outset, they engaged systems for the lightweight prefabrication dwelling units that could be assembled in different ways.63 Yet they quickly turned away from steel and plastics to embrace an even lighter and less-­established technology: pneumatics. Not unlike pages cheaply printed via offset lithography, pneumatics were conceived for rapid reproducibility in potentially unlimited copies, and could be directly assembled, taken apart, and disposed of by users themselves. Such a drawing highlights just how much the architectural interest in pneumatics was not an exception or anomaly but a deeply conjunctural phenomenon in which a concern for open-­ended, reconfigurable systems of parts met with the greater availability of mass-­produced polymers. While inflatable technologies were, by the mid-­1960s, increasingly solicited by cultural and commercial interests, they remained largely the product of highly specific industrial applications. Pneumatics were undergoing the cultural “mediatization” that had interested Utopie, and it was through such a process that the architectural disposition of this material technology would be established. Seizing pneumatics at such a “moment of transformation,” Utopie did not simply lay claim to a material but found itself pulled in different and often incompatible directions. The problems of assembly and disassembly that guided the group’s work with inflatables negotiated these tensions, just as pneumatic materials fueled the group’s effort to theorize architecture’s relationship to technological change. 215 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.17. Jean Aubert, Jean-­Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco, with Jean Sémichon, Propo­ sition d’habitations industrialisées à possibilités multiples. Competition entry for Concours International pour une Unité d’Habitation, 1966. Courtesy Jean-Paul Jungmann.

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Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco first began working with pneumatics in 1967, taking it as the subject of their joint diploma project at the École des Beaux-­Arts at a time when inflatables were lighting up architectural culture’s radar. The moment was memorably captured in Banham’s 1968 article “Monu­mental Windbags,” published on the heels of his encounter with the Utopie group’s work in Paris.64 Banham was at pains to point out that pneumatic technologies were nothing new—­architectural uses of pneumatics could be traced back to World War I, at least. What was new was the sudden cultural fascination with pneumatics, which, he argued, reflected a combination of do-­it-­yourself technical simplicity with the animating phenomenological properties of low-­pressure membranes. Recalling the experience of being immersed in a transparent pneumatic bubble at a BBC television studio, he noted that it was “more truly like the skin of a living creature than the metaphorical ‘skin’ of say, a glass-­walled office block.”65 The pneumatic enclosure at the BBC was not unlike Francois Dallegret’s Environment Bubble,

which accompanied Banham’s 1965 article “A Home Is Not a House” and was claimed as evidence of a particular teleology of technological development. “The goal of present trends in domestic mechanization,” he wrote, “appears to be ever-­more flimsy structure that is made habitable by ever-­more massive machinery.”66 Such a vision of expendable enclosure ratified a key assertion Banham had made a few years previously in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960): the growing incompatibility between the habits of the architectural profession and those of technological development. “The enduring attachment to architecture-­as-­monumental-­space,” he concluded, was evidence not of maturity but of the “sentimentality” and “insecurity” of most American architects, who refused to accept that technology was heading not in the direction of structural refinement but toward the increasing sophistication of environmental conditioning equipment.67 Banham’s interpretation proved persuasive, yet it missed something important in the case of Utopie’s work with inflatables, which offers an opportunity to reread the pneumatic conjuncture of the late 1960s somewhat differently. Pneumatics proved to be a canny and malleable choice for students negotiating the complexities of the late Beaux-­Arts system: novel enough to shock more conservative members of the school, yet capable of being elaborated through technical drawing, the chief requirement of the intensive mise-­en-­ forme required for graduation. The mise-­en-­forme stipulated the production of roughly ten square meters of drawings realized on standard 1.25 by 1.8 meter sheets of paper backed with wooden supports, to be reviewed in a public jury.68 All three diploma projects insisted on being totally pneumatic—­from walls to floors, windows, enclosures, beams, and joints—­and interpreted this challenge through different structural geometries.69 Jungmann’s Dyodon was a hybrid system developed on the basis of a complex rhombicuboctahedral geometry that differentiated between the vertices of structural members and faces of pneumatic panels, a separation allowing for interchangeable relations between panel and frame (Plate 32). The structural members could be filled with air, with gases of various densities, or with water, earth, or concrete, altering the structure’s overall mass and stability. Aubert’s project for a pneumatic dome system was unconventional in that while air-­supported structures were commonly used for dome enclosures, his was a tensile structural system composed of high-­pressure pneumatic tubes.70 Less polyhedral than either Jungmann’s or Aubert’s projects, Stinco’s project for a mobile exhibition system used several irregularly formed, clear pneumatic “bubbles” anchored by a textile and cable skin. Not unlike the members of Jungmann’s Dyodon, these inflatable supports also served as empty containers, spaces to be filled. 217 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.18.

Ivan Leonidov, Lenin Institute of Librarianship, reproduced in advertisement for Anatole Kopp’s Ville et revolution, Utopie 1 (1967).

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Stinco envisioned a traveling exhibit on the “sociology of the everyday object,” a program strongly reminiscent of the grids of objects he was simultaneously assembling in the pages of Utopie. If all three projects explored the structural potentials of pneumatics, there was equally a tension between image and material in their work. The group’s emphasis on assembly and geometry re­ directed the formally amorphous possibilities of inflatable skins, making them serve particular structural logics. To envision a structural system that could be logically and literally disassembled, they needed to endow the formless and fluid aspect of pneumatics with a rationality of parts and seams. For all the emphasis on technique, the projects amalgamated diverse visual references drawn from the history of architecture as well as from the mass culture of their moment. The PVC, vinyl, Mylar, and other synthetic materials used for inflatables had only just begun to enter the architectural repertoire. In many cases they devolved from the research and design programs of the military, heavy industry, or space exploration, and had been taken up at the margins of the field, in temporary structures for defense, communications technology, spectacles, or exhibitions. One of the best-­known examples was Victor Lundy and Walter Bird’s Atoms for Peace exhibition hall, which traveled around the world at the beginning of the 1960s. The group was also aware of the pneumatic studies made by Frei Otto in Stuttgart; the images of soap bubbles reproduced in Otto’s Zugbeanspruchte Konstruktionen (1962) provided a source for the transparent volumes of Stinco’s exhibition hall.71 Still other, less contemporary references can be discerned. The first issue of the group’s journal included an advertisement for Anatole Kopp’s groundbreaking Ville et revolution: Architectes et urbanistes soviétiques des années vingt, the first French source to historically document the Russian constructivist experiments of the 1920s. The group reproduced an image of Ivan Leonidov’s 1927 model for the transparent auditorium of the Lenin Institute of Librarianship—­a sphere held aloft and braced to the ground with tension cables. Leonidov’s model strained against gravity just as it resisted mooring in time, evincing the optimism of a futuristic yet unrealized construction, just as it evoked the pneumatic form of the hot-­air balloons used by eighteenth-­ century aviation pioneers. Leonidov’s reappearance, in the late 1960s, marked the return of a historically

repressed avant-­garde, drawing fresh attention to the importance of lightness and of new structural principles within the constructivist movement. Alongside such technical and historical references was the group’s connection to the world of fashion, in part through Stinco and his wife, the designer Christiane Bailly. Just as materials like PVC, vinyl, and Elasthane were central to the “space-­age” prêt-­à-­porter clothing of André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, the impermanence of pneumatic architecture resonated with a design ethos that used cheap, standardized, and changeable materials for a mass audience to question and undermine couture’s long-­standing aspiration toward timelessness.72

Inflatable Structures The fact that pneumatics sat at such a complex intersection of technical, visual, and historical references was also what allowed the group to seize pneumatics as an opportunity to theorize the relationship between architecture, mass culture, and technology. The exhibition Structures Gonflables, organized by the group in March 1968, provided an unprecedented opportunity to do so (Plate 33). The opportunity came from the curator Pierre Gaudi­ bert, who directed a newly formed division of the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: Animation Recherche Confrontation. ARC’s mandate was to expand the institution’s engagement with popular education, through a reflection on the culture of industrial society and “the aesthetics of everyday life.” Structures Gonflables was one of the earliest efforts in this direction, becoming the first time the museum had exhibited objects other than works of art within its walls. The proximity of Structures Gonflables to the events of May 1968 has been interpreted as an indication of the intimate link between pneumatics and the uprisings and occupations that spring, yet pneumatics remained often in tension, rather than in consonance, with political militancy.73 There was a certain drama to this ill-­fitting relationship that the group seemed to relish. Visitors to the exhibition encountered a two-­story rubber rocket tipped sideways to fit into the entrance hall before encountering a dirigible wedged into a rectangular gallery. Other spaces were filled with a heterogeneous collision of objects that aimed to overwhelm the visitor with interiors as densely packed as the magazine’s layout. Galleries included everything from hovercrafts to aircraft tires, emergency life rafts, weather balloons, projection environments, decompression chambers, dirigibles, furniture, Mylar clouds, high-­altitude pressure suits, and more.74 Le Monde’s critic described the exhibition as a “universe in levitation.”75 Supporting such 219 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

floating encounters, however, was a distinctly un-­pneumatic apparatus: scaffolding. The steel armature supported objects but also threaded the exhibition with a dense layer of information panels. On the one hand, these recall the relationship of object and information used in commercial exhibitions, including texts, photographs, technical specifications, material samples, operating pressures, dimensions, and availability. Yet other panels occupied a more ambiguous position, offering a detailed overview of France’s first ­radome—­a pneumatic enclosure at Pleumeur-­Bodou, Normandy, which was an important node in transatlantic satellite telecommunications. Others offered historical genealogies of dirigibles and weather balloons, or assembled pneumatic associations from art history and literature. The actual objects, together with the visual information and technical specifications, were assembled by correspondence, through a brief survey that the group circulated directly to manufacturers. Together, the panels and the catalog index the unwieldy field of the objects collected for the exhibition, which included fuel storage reservoirs, pneumatic tank bridges, radomes, hovercraft, undersea vessels, high-­altitude reflector satellites, PVC sculptures, and antiradiation suits. Such breadth also highlights the degree to which the exhibition was not only a display of objects but an effort to compile technical information and

FIGURE 4.19. Utopie, Structures Gonflables, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, March 1968. Installation view. Copyright Utopie. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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FIGURE 4.20. Utopie,

Structures Gonflables, Paris, March 1968. Installation view. Copyright Utopie. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

FIGURE 4.21.

Information panel on the Pleumeur Bodou Radome, Structures Gonflables, March 1968. Copyright Utopie. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

subject this to theoretical scrutiny.76 Structures Gonflables might be understood less as an exhibition of inflatable architecture than as an effort to inventory a technical field that had not yet been absorbed by architectural culture. In this sense, Utopie’s exhibition was something other than the do-­it-­yourself enclosures of the type praised by Banham. With Structures Gonflables, pneumatics appears as a still-­evolving techno-­cultural assemblage ranging from sophisticated military gear to disposable beach toys. None of these objects appeared in isolation; rather, they were strung together, a conjunction of ele­ments drawn from disparate industrial areas at a moment when such artifacts had not yet acquired the coherence, prominence, and visibility that would mark their spectacular deployment at World’s Fairs such as Osaka in 1970. Rather than divine the future direction of technological development, Structures Gonflables was an opportunity to theorize the cultural forces that mediated access to such technical objects.

Plastic Objects The distance between Banham and Utopie’s account of pneumatic technology appears most clearly in the exhibition’s catalog; Auricoste and Tonka rejected precisely the idea that technology was a force autonomous from social and economic factors, obeying imperatives of its own.77 In contrast to this view, which they associated with technocracy, they stressed that only by examining “the concrete state of a technology . . . of this or that particular technique” could one move away from assertions about technology in general, to study the “reasons for the unequal practical distribution of technics.”78 Rather than ask how far the domain of architectural culture lagged behind engineering or materials science, they looked to analyze how a social imaginary mediated the transformation of technological practices into particular objects. Such an analysis demanded an approach that did not distinguish beforehand between what belonged to art, architecture, aerospace, oil exploration, or advertising. “To correctly interpret the forms in which a social imaginary is recognized,” they argued, “it is necessary to call on a method which holds good as much for the products of industry . . . as for sculptural objects (objets plastiques).”79 In this light, Structures Gonflables’s unwieldy assemblage of objects was an effort toward elaborating such an embracing method of interpretation. The reference to objets plastiques did not mean only those pneumatics developed by artists, or the quasi-­sculptural quality of certain inflated objects; the effort, rather, was to theorize the plasticity of form in postwar culture and its relationship to technics. A key source for this endeavor was the work of the 222 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

art historian Pierre Francastel.80 Another was that of Baudrillard, who developed his 1968 book The System of Objects during a period of intense collabo­ ration with the group.81 Separated by a generation, both figures produced theories of the object that worked through Lewis Mumford’s and Siegfried Giedion’s earlier efforts to theorize the role of mechanization within architectural history. Internal to each thinker’s account of the object was a different theory of assembly. Francastel’s Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1956) was the most influential architectural history in France at the time, and at its center was a broadly anthropological notion of the “plastic object.” It was through this notion that Francastel set works of art and architecture in relation with everyday tools and machines, part of his search for a comparative understanding of changes in what he called the “modern figurative order.”82 In contrast to Banham, Francastel argued that technological advancement or delay could not explain central shifts in the course of modern architecture. And while clearly indebted to Giedion’s work on mechanization, Francastel refused the latter’s historical schema, in particular the Riegelian notion that modern architecture embodied a transcendental “space conception” inaugurated by the “optical revolution” of cubist painting.83 Taking up the larger structuralist turn in French intellectual life during the 1950s, Francastel argued that what allowed something as different as a painting, a building, or an object to be compared was their status as “structures” composed of “arbitrary relationships between elements that the artist borrows from reality.”84 Francastel stressed the assembled nature of such structures, which combined the figurative values, needs, and activities appreciated by culture at a given moment.85 Montages and other forms of serial combination, he argued, were essential for understanding modern architecture’s figurative structures, which were informed by “eyes and minds [that] are daily trained to record and interpret rapidly changing relationships.”86 Indeed, a new conception of montage was central to the changes in construction associated with modern architecture: The most original contribution made in the field of construction during our times is a particular conception of montage, which depends . . . on the general comprehension of the mechanical processes involved in the production of the object. The progression from the detached house or two-­story rental property to the skyscraper, or the modern housing unit, did not result only from a quantitative increase in the means of production; it also grew from a recognition of man’s new power to create materials as well as from 223 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

his desire to group related activities together through an unprecedented understanding of space and time. The great modern buildings are not simply a conglomeration of old-­style dwellings; they reflect new combinatory principles.87

For Francastel, montage was not a specific modernist technique but a general historical category for comprehending modernism more generally. Montage articulated “new combinatory principles,” novel forms of assembly that were evident, for Francastel, in the complex structural and programmatic grouping of a building like Le Corbusier’s recently completed Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1952), which he both hailed and chastised. Whereas a figure like Sergei Eisenstein had theorized montage in terms of a dialectical conflict between material fragments, for Francastel montage shaded into a structuralist notion of the combinatoire; the collection of signifying elements whose assembly and recombination generated signification. The ability to disassemble, combine, and rearrange such elements was central to works of art and architecture because it revealed something deeper: a mental plasticity that Francastel saw as sustaining the human ability to adapt to constantly changing social and technical circumstances.88 In such passages, Francastel’s notion of montage as assembly appears at its most optimistic, theorizing combinatory principles that could shape the course of mechanization and the development of art and architecture, promising, as Yve-­Alain Bois has remarked, nothing short of a new relationship between man and technology.89 Writing a decade after Francastel, Baudrillard was equally concerned with principles of combination yet less sanguine about their potential for technical and aesthetic transformation. If the early twentieth century had witnessed a potentially emancipatory reshaping of relations between technology, mecha­ nization, and art, these opportunities, he argued, remained frustrated, subsumed within what he termed “the system of objects.”90 Postwar consumer culture could no longer be grasped at the level of individual commodities but had to be understood in terms of increasingly systematic relationships between objects and signifying practices, in which inessential differences were more thoroughly “systematized by the production process.”91 Drawing together the structuralist semiology that Barthes had used to decompose advertising and fashion, and strains of Western Marxism devoted to a critique of the culture industry and everyday life, Baudrillard looked to understand the dialectical interaction between a dynamic and unpredictable structure of technological development, on the one hand, and a cultural structure that arrested, organized, and codified such technics into systems of form, on the 224 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

other. Like Stinco, Baudrillard associated this system with the expansion of industrial styling, first pioneered in automotive industries and subsequently extended to a broad range of consumer goods. The styling programs and coordinated furnishing systems cited by Baudrillard provided a different image of combinatory principles; less the unprecedented re­assembly of construction techniques and human activities offered by Francastel than the systematic proliferation of marginal differences within mass production.92 The production of such marginal differences was the complement of a new regime of what Baudrillard called “abstract power.”93 Adding a new dimension to Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the systematic coherence of marginal and superficial variations obscured the object’s status as a product of ­labor while compensating for the fragmentation of formerly unified functions. Fluid, transitive, enveloping, [form] unifies appearances by transcending the alarming discontinuity of the various mechanisms involved, replacing it with a coherent whole. . . . our technological civilization tries to use the universal transitivity of form as a means of compensating for the disappearance of the symbolic relationship associated with the traditional gestural system of work, as a way of making up for the unreality, the symbolic void of our power.94

If the outsides of objects were alarmingly discontinuous from their internal workings, their increasingly minute design enunciated a compensatory rhetoric of control. Such a social authority solicited the subject through a systematic coordination of form, which, together with a psychologized communicational coherence, held out a promise of wholeness for a subject whose relationship to objects—­cut up, redistributed, and rendered abstract—­could no longer be symbolized or physically grasped.95 Such a condition ultimately transformed the notion of the “functional” object inherited from an earlier moment of the modern movement. Function no longer referred to an object’s suitedness to its task; rather, the purpose of functional objects was to mark differences within a system of commodities and to integrate subjects—­via consumer choice—­into the illusory coherence of a consumption system.96 In theorizing the dialectical relationship between signifying practices and technical objects, Baudrillard was interested in not only “the abstract con­ sistency of the system of objects, but, rather, its directly experienced contradictions.”97 In such a system, design and architecture were understood as crucial mechanisms of social integration, just as they were more radically detached from, and indeed came to impede, substantive technical development.98 A 225 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

related contradiction charges the field of objects assembled for Structures Gonflables. Compatible with an emerging rubric of flexibility and indeterminacy, such pneumatic objects were simple to put up and take down, responsive to changes in climate and use, and avoided any permanent relationship to the ground, and thus to questions of real estate. Experimental architects remained largely disconnected from the most sophisticated contemporary appropriations of pneumatic techniques, the bulk of which remained confined to sectors like defense, aerospace, science, and industry. Pneumatic apparatuses were captivating for precisely this reason; belonging to a domain of “pure technique” whose disposition had not been fully determined, they appeared to be a heterogeneous set of technical possibilities at the limits of the architectural discipline, whose cultural code had not yet cohered.99 In this sense they were less an example of Baudrillard’s system of objects than a breach within it. Yet pneumatics could also appear perilously close to auto­mobile styling, objects whose surfaces changed continually without any necessary improvement in underlying mechanics. Unlike the automobile, however, pneumatics promised a more immediate link, a continuity even, between structure and surface—­ responsive to forces exerted on it, and in turn eliciting a response from the body, pneumatics implied a surface where object and subject pushed back against each other. Laying claim to their teacher Henri Lefebvre’s slogan, “all technology at the service of everyday life,” the group sought to envision other uses for such technics, which carried the promise of disrupting the reigning order of things.100 Not unlike the contemporaneous emergence of forms of cheap and changeable standardization in pop music or fashion, pneumatics promised a “moment of transformation,” whose instabili­ties might enable a decomposition of inherited cultural codes by connecting them to the unpredictable effects of an emerging technology. Utopie’s rhetoric of disassembly sought to disperse and dismantle the forms of coherence structuring advertising images, and with pneumatics such a project confronted an object that was seemingly open to appropria­ tion yet also strangely resistant to it. The pneumatic prototypes developed by Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco provide a glimpse of how these architects struggled to negotiate this liminal zone. Emphasizing low-­cost, mass-­ production units, their designs were neither the low-­pressure membranes discussed by Banham nor inflatable substitutes for existing furniture types. Designed as low-­cost mass-­production units with the plastics manufacturer SCIFA, the ensemble was described as a system of “furnishing elements” (éléments du mobilier). Sets of standard components were designed in different colors and surfaces, combining a flocked surface that was soft to the touch 226 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

and translucent PVC that displayed the emptiness of the air-­filled volumes. A component-­based system, it offered the user the ability to blow up or deflate at will, but also the flexibility to interchange and rearrange parts in order to form different objects, from a wall partition to a divan, bed, or seat. Designed to be rearranged, the furnishing appears as a temporary conjunction of elements that can be taken apart again at any time. Such “furnishing elements” imagined a destructured domestic life, one that eliminated weight and permanence, altering the very attachment to objects. The object, on the threshold of its disappearance, became an ephemeral environmental medium FIGURE 4.22. AJS

Aerolande, Inflatable furnishing elements. Exhibited at L’univers des jeunes, Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 1967. Copyright Jean-­Paul Jungmann.

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FIGURE 4.23. Jean

Aubert, Jean-­Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco, Testing an inflatable tensegrity structure, Paris, June 1967. Film set for Charles Belmont, director, L’écume des jours, 1967. Copyright Jean-­Paul Jungmann.

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open to continual disassembly and reassembly, the instrument of a flexible, indeterminate, and highly temporary inhabitation. If such furnishing systems promised forms of interchangeable assembly, the individual pneumatic elements, composed of welded sheets of plastic and rubber, depended on the minute integrity of every inch of their seams, a system in which even the minutest discontinuity threatened leakage, deformation, and collapse. The threat of such discontinuities yielded a multiplication of elements in Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco’s pneumatic projects, such as their contemporaneous set design elements for Charles Belmont’s filmic adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel L’écume des jours. The repetition of high-­pressure tubes allowed for demountability, but even more importantly, they created a system whose overall structure could continue to be self-­supporting when subject to potential deformations. The group’s particular insistence on dismantling again becomes palpable; the amorphous plasticity of pneumatics was redirected toward a taut geometric structure; at once drawing on and exacerbating the

constructive systems of their mentors Emmerich and Albert. What Banham had summarized as a combination of disaffection for “official modern architecture” and an enthusiasm for do-­it-­yourself technology can be seen in these cases as the site of a deeper contradiction. If such pneumatic structures appeared as a way to dismantle architecture’s attachment to values of durability and permanence, they did so by drawing architecture closer to the logic of the disposable commodity, which appeared not only as an expendable object but as part of a broader inducement toward flexiblity in structure and program.101

Architecture as a Theoretical Problem Both the more optimistic view of Francastel and the more pessimistic analy­ sis of Baudrillard aligned concepts of assembly with the combinatory principles associated with aesthetic or signifying practices. To the extent that such principles structured the relationship between technical practices and those of consumption, they promised a new grasp on the larger processes of mediation in which architectural production participated. Returning to the montages published in “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem,” they might be seen as efforts to take apart the expanded combinatoire of French consumer society in the latter half of the 1960s, a project that connected Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer goods in The System of Objects to wider urban transformations that were reshaping Paris and its banlieues.102 As seen through the lens of the dominant illustrated magazines and journals of the day, the transformation of Paris’s urban fabric, not unlike Baudrillard’s system of objects, took on an imaginary, and fungible, form of coherence. Absent in the city as it was experienced, such coherence, they argued, was produced “outside the direct apprehension of the senses, outside of the built world that forms the references of the social imaginary for architectural production.”103 The fact that such coherence was imaginary did not mean it was inconsequential; rather, such an imaginary crucially supported the enactment of the urban planning and demolition taking place in Paris during these years. Such concerns motivated Utopie’s reflection on the ways in which architecture was represented in “newspapers, general interest magazines, trade journals, official and institutional texts,” and on the representational mechanisms deployed in the definition of new urban sites.104 In the montage sequences of “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem,” the transformation of the city appears neither in the form of planning diagrams nor as perspectival renderings but in the collision of parallel columns of text and image. The columns were a formal constraint that mimicked the layout characteristic of the mass-­market illustrated 229 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

magazines that had been the source of many of the image fragments, the verti­cal division that publications such as Paris-­Match, Elle, or L’immo­bi­ lier used to separate editorial content from advertising. Using this format against itself, the group exacerbated and collapsed the directed connotation of advertising rhetoric, reinserting this material into the space of architectural discourse through the very conventions of advertising. Such an effort undermined what the group saw as an illusory separation characteristic of architectural journals such as L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, one that isolated architecture, editorially and ideologically, from the political economies of industrial production and contemporary urbanism.105 “Open any architectural magazine published in France,” the group contended, and the problematic raised empirically and at the lowest level by the real estate journals does not appear. There are no explanations whatsoever of real actions (property, pressure groups, decisions of the State). . . . The message is clear: spatialization and the structural shaping of space, the specific object of architectonic activity (professional institutions) is signified ideologically as a thing-­in-­itself, referring to two groups of activities devoid of any political or social implications: Art and Technology.106

If the critique aimed to dismantle a particular image of architectonic practice, whose role was to synthesize the realms of art and technology, it did so through a format that effected a continual collision between reading and seeing, seeking to bring the social implications of art and technology to the surface. To do so was also to make visible what had been repressed not only within the discourse but within the very layout of a dominant periodical like L’architecture d’aujourd’hui.107 In “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem” Paris did not appear as a visual whole or as a collection of singular sites. The production of new centers in the suburbs of Paris appears again and again, yet always indirectly, via the reassembly of bits of advertisements, headlines, and fragments of photo­ journalism. In one panel, a traffic jam shares the frame with a new suburban high-­rise, a team of architects and planners, and a “citizen consumer” pronouncing a détourned denunciation of “pure appearance.” The composition was framed by conflicting fragments of magazine copy highlighting the contradiction between the desire to leave the city and the need to get back into it.108 A range of clipped elements displaced from the real estate press surrounded this effort to envision the contradictions of the suburban dwell230 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

ing. These included advertisements for “made-­to-­measure” “Immobilia” mortgages, featuring images of couples young and old paired with miniature models of their dream homes—­a generic tower block and small bungalow, respectively—­as well as a composite array of promotions for new suburban developments. Slogans such as “all the comforts of the XXth century in a rediscovered corner of the XVIIth” highlighted appeals to nostalgia within modernization. An illustrated floor plan from an interior decorating magazine and a photograph of architects discussing a model of a new urban district were pieced together to parody and subvert the image of the architect as a figure confidently directing the rapidly changing suburban landscape (Plate  34). Fragments taken from an advertisement for Paris 2 pointed to an extreme instance of such new developments. One of the earliest and largest French mall projects of the time, Paris 2 sought to combine an imported American shopping center model with a massive five thousand–­unit condominium development.109 Paris 2 promoted itself as a new image of Paris, a configuration of the most desirable brands of the late-­1960s consumer “combinatoire,” and the newest features of domestic design. It was to be its own center of gravity, with shopping, housing, and amenities, a model Paris remade and set apart from the actual urban fabric of the sprawling metropolitan region.110 The collision and relinkage of image and text fragments in the montages of “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem” appropriated the connotations of such a simulacral doubling of “Paris” to both amplify and subvert its rhetoric. Amid this simulacral condition, no site of urban redevelopment was more contested than the planned demolition of the historic iron canopies of Victor Baltard’s Les Halles market. Not surprisingly, images of Les Halles appeared at the center of the most widely reproduced montage from Utopie’s article.111 The assembled visual fragments were less images of the site than public controversies surrounding its future. The montage’s most prominent element was a tower stamped with the profile of General Charles de Gaulle clipped from the satirical newspaper Le canard enchaînée, parodying the heavy-­ handedness of the president’s plans with the Franco-­German rhyme “De Gaulle über Halles.” Alongside it was the profile of a similarly controversial project designed by a professor at the École des Beaux-­Arts, Jean Faugeron, for the National Ministry of Education, a symbol attacked by striking architecture students during May 1968. Between the two, suturing them together, was the Cybernetic Tower, Nicolas Schöffer’s project for an enormous illuminated tower conceived as an urban feedback mechanism for the nascent quartier de la Défense in the early 1960s, and which Baudrillard saw as emblematic of an emerging “metadesign,” in which art operationalized itself at a 231 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

FIGURE 4.24. Utopie, layout from “Architecture comme problème théorique,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, September 1968. Copyright Utopie.

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general urban level via principles drawn from cybernetics.112 Like much of the material in “Architecture as a Theoreti­ cal Problem,” the image of Schöffer’s tower was clipped from a regular advertisement appearing in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, for the stainless steel tubing company Vallourec. The Faugeron tower, by contrast, had been extracted from a bombastic series of articles in Paris-­Match from the summer of 1967 that claimed to reveal, for the first time, the scope of de Gaulle’s vision for the replanning of Paris.113 The magazine’s editors commissioned the cartographer-­ illustrator Tanguy de Rémur to paint a series of panoramic perspectives from plans provided by the general delegate for the Paris region. These “dessins-­ verités,” as the editors dubbed them, were presented as full-­page images in lavish color, and claimed to faithfully reflect the details of the state’s plans. The constellation of imagined and projected towers in Utopie’s montage assembled a satirical physiognomy of such Gaullist panoramas, a vision of the city in stark contrast to the photographs of buildings in the bottom half of the montage. There, an emphatically discontinuous heap of architectural fragments—­from the Seagram Building to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Archigram’s Montreal Tower, and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67—­piled up in a moment of monumental dedifferentiation. In such a divided frame, the imaginary coherence of the panoramic perspective surmounted a type of rubble composed of

key modern­ist buildings from the previous two decades. The horizontal axis running through the middle of the frame was thus a formal pivot essential to this disassembly, conjoining projections of Paris’s future to their opposite: a sense that the larger urban modernization of the Paris region was paradoxically linked to a breakdown of the modern movement in architecture. In the article’s layout, this schizoid frame was sandwiched between an image of puzzled onlookers viewing a model of Les Halles and an image of a hand shaping a clay model, whose caption confidently declared that “five millimeters make all the difference.” Utopie’s caustically comic montage encapsulated its more fundamental critique of the roles allotted to the public and the architect in such urban development plans; the former consigned to the role of onlookers, while the latter was deemed relevant only for aesthetic expertise. The trope of the architect’s hand pointing to an urban model was one that Le Corbusier had helped establish at the end of the 1920s, an enduring image in which a demiurgic control over space was made synonymous with

FIGURE 4.25. “Buy

your apartment at Parly 2,” Parly 2 Shopping Center, Le Chesnay, France, November 1970. Photograph copyright Léon Claude Vénézia. Digital image copyright Roger-­ Viollet / The Image Works.

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FIGURE 4.26.

Utopie, “De Gaulle über Halles,” from “Architecture comme problème théorique,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, September 1968. Copyright Utopie.

FIGURE 4.27. Jean

Faugeron, Project for the Ministry of National Education, as reproduced in “Paris dans vingt ans,” Paris-­Match, no. 951 (July 1967). Copyright Paris-­Match.

the architect’s capacity to envision the future in model form. Photographs of architects presenting their models would have been fresh in the minds of many readers; Paris-­Match’s issue on the future of Paris featured a double-­ page group portrait of architects tapped by the de Gaulle administration for proposals for Les Halles (Plate 35). In Utopie’s layout, the images of hands and models affected each other solely by reason of their sequential proximity. As in cinematic montage, the separate frames accrued a new meaning independent of their disparate origins. The impression that the hand shaping 235 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

the model belonged to an architect was an effect of its placement next to an image of Georges Candilis. In this case the linkage was a subtle joke to be decoded by attentive readers; the hand did not belong to Candilis but was drawn from a widely circulated period advertisement extolling the formal perfection of a particular brand of cigarette lighter.114 Such collisions highlighted a central facet of Utopie’s critique: the expectation that architects and planners work to integrate, absorb, and manage the contradictions latent in such urban redevelopment schemes.115 The scrambled advertisements reassembled within the pages of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui played the promises of freedom purveyed by consumer advertising against the state’s effort to command Parisian urban development, evidence of an urban condition that eluded the Gaullist panorama, and which could not be made whole. The thinking of the group’s erstwhile mentor, Henri Lefebvre, provided a key support for this different conception of the urban problematic. Lefebvre’s contemporaneous theorization of the “urban revolution” argued that older models of the city were no longer viable for comprehending the trajectory of “total urbanization” characteristic of late twentieth-­century development.116 This more encompassing form of urbani­zation was characterized by what he called the simultaneous implosion and explosion of older models, resulting in an urban condition that was at once more distributed and homogeneous, yet also less integrated and stable. Such a condition was marked by the rise of new typologies—­dormitory suburbs, factories, university campuses, and “grandes ensembles”—­as well as new urban practices and modes of inhabitation. The urban, regional, and economic planning that aimed to unify the exploded urban condition entered into conflict with practices that failed to conform to, or actively resisted, such management and control. Discourses of integration were central to these tensions. The dominant ideological terms in which such integration was framed, Utopie argued, were divided between a neohumanist appeal to city building as an “art” of composition and a technocratic emphasis on forms of planning derived from economic forecasting and industry.117 The result, the group noted, was that the contradictions of capitalism, which, according to Marx, were supposed to cause it to collapse, cannot be annihilated, and so must be integrated into the solidification of the society of capital. But is it true that what is integrated cannot be disintegrated? Or what is structured cannot be destructured? . . . This is where the strategy must be dismantled [démonté].118 236 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

What was to be dismantled in this scenario was not strictly architecture but the larger strategy of closure and cohesion to which it was connected. Such a project was not accessible through traditional questions of typology—­what they called “the architecture of cultural edifices, of labor, of housing, or of leisure”—­nor did it follow from a more classically Marxist emphasis on the analysis of “architecture in relationship to the economic or the ‘social.’ ”119 To contend with architecture’s position in the capitalist metropolis, one need to decompose the labyrinthine “Luna park” of “real and imaginary facts,” whose phantasmagoric coherence absorbed and obscured the period’s contradictions.120 Taking apart the mechanisms of integration called for an analytic disassembly that could reveal still-­unintegrated conflicts. It was an effort at odds with two dominant arguments of the period, seeing architecture neither as a problem of form autonomous from functional and economic forces nor as a type of instrumental intelligence capable of solving utilitarian problems. The group’s call to formulate architecture not as an art, a service, or a technical instrument but as a “theoretical problem” found its corollary in Utopie’s montages. Refusing to project an architecture for urban society, they nonetheless used visual disassembly to project a critical desire: to make legible the contradictions at the heart of industrialized consumer urbanism through the very images that obscured these tensions. The group’s rhetoric of disassembly, moreover, theorized architectural production as one forged by the mediation of contradictory forces, an instance of overdetermination at the intersection of culture, economics, technology, urban development, and mass media. The collision of something as trivial as a lighter with a problem as large as Les Halles invited laughter, as the connotations in such advertisements went awry. In a context defined, on the one hand, by the editorial neutrality of dominant periodicals like L’architecture d’aujourd’hui and, on the other, by the militancies of the ex–­École des Beaux-­Arts, disassembly looked to take apart key aspects of architectural culture while holding open a space in which the parodic and the serious could be engaged simultaneously.121 Laughter also served to counter a cultural system that members of the group saw as essentially empty and increasingly closed in on itself. Baudrillard’s effort to theorize the rise of a semiotic exchange value in The System of Objects was one effort to describe this more general closure. The codification of semiotic differences was integral to the ways commodities circulated in the late 1960s, and not only at the level of advertisement. Signifying processes penetrated the design of mass-­produced goods, just as signification was itself absorbed into commodification, such that both became levels within a single, general system. Such a system was crucial not only to production but to 237 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

subjectivation, as differentiation through consumption came to inflect the perception of differences between individuals and classes. Moreover, such a system of objects did not operate in a vacuum but was central to the reshaping of the Parisian metropolis, coordinated in and through sites such as Les Halles and Paris 2. In such a scenario, the demand for coherence among systems of differences appeared ever more total and at the same time increasingly opaque and arbitrary. If Baudrillard aimed to show how such a pseudototality operated as a system, it was one that was never fully secure; the system of objects, he argued, could also be seen as “a systematization of fragility.”122 Citing the ephemerality of fashion, the febrility of objects designed to fall apart, and the ever more rapid passages between satisfaction and disillusion, the specter of disassembly haunted Baudrillard’s objects. Once assembled and mounted the components of the technical object imply a certain coherence. But such a structure is always vulnerable to the human mind. . . . The hierarchy of elements can be dismantled at any time, and those elements made interchangeable within a paradigmatic system that the subject uses for his self-­ narration. The object is discontinuous already—­and certainly easy for thought to disassemble.123

Articulated at a moment that problematized architectural culture from nearly every angle—­from teaching and history to the value of individual practice and the legitimacy of the profession—­the rhetoric of disassembly was simultaneously a media practice, a way to conceptualize new materials and technologies, and a way to envision urban space otherwise.124 The collaborative effort to theorize architecture as a form of production depended crucially on developing ways to intervene in and reconfigure the space of printed communication, the matrix in which word and image were assembled. Both in print and in the designing of pneumatic prototypes, procedures of assembling and dismantling attempted to redefine technologies whose status appeared uncertain, whose possibilities lay in the degree to which they were not yet definitively imprinted by the dominant cultural imaginary. Offset lithography likewise provided a way to transform an inexpensive, self-­directed, and handmade product into a mass medium.125 Fueled by a simultaneous interest in an ephemeral and reconfigurable architecture and in pushing demountable technologies to their limits, the group’s effort to link pneumatics and disassembly was caught between the hard and the soft: a salient moment of transformation. If their critique of the profession was developed in the name 238 DISASSEMBLING PARIS

of utopia, unlike many other groups at the time, they refused to project a utopian image of the future, seeking instead an alternative to the norms of professional practice.126 Introducing the magazine in 1967, the group offered two blank rectangles. Outlining the magazine’s column grid, it also evoked the ephemerality of air. Returning to the etymology of utopia, they pointed less to the good place (eu-­topos) than to the no place (u-­topos), stressing what was lacking in the present. Speaking of “the uncrossed interval between praxis and theory,” they sought to exceed their individual disciplinary specializations, and described Utopie as “a phase of theoretical construction.”127 If the rhetoric of disassembly took word and image apart in an effort to read the contemporary transformation of architecture amid the emergence of an advanced urban consumer society, it also sought forms of practice that could exceed and thus question the professional identities of the group’s members, going beyond collaboration to more radically question what an architect, a sociologist, an urban planner, or philosopher was. It was a risky intellectual wager. Just as the object is taken apart, so is the subject. Articulated amid the political and theoretical turbulence of the end of the 1960s, the rhetoric of disassembly was something of an impossible balancing act, refusing both the traditional fixity demanded of architecture and the programmed fungibility of styling, wagering on a more profoundly unstable interaction between technics and culture. Not insignificantly, this more radically dismantled architecture was tied to a faith in theoretical construction. In this sense, the literal instability of pneumatic structure was an indispensable vehicle for the larger intellectual project of disassembly. Understanding architecture not as an art, a service, or a technical instrument but as a “theoretical problem” ultimately sought to reflect on the workings of architecture’s production in order to question how disciplinary limits were drawn.

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5

SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS Superstudio’s Mediascapes

The new objects are at once things and images of things: the dream car is a car and the projection of a car, the new monument is the image of the monument. —­“Superarchitecture II”

Among the works that have come to stand for the discord within architectural culture at the end of the 1960s, few are more frequently reproduced than the photomontages created by Florence’s Superstudio group. The group constructed projects such as the Continuous Monument (1969–­71), the Twelve Cautionary Tales (1969), and the Fundamental Acts (1971–­73) through fragile and banal paper media, and set them into circulation via continually shifting formats in self-­published magazines, professional periodicals, exhibitions, prints, films, slides, and lectures. Such projects, specifically designed for printed paper or celluloid film, might have quickly disappeared. Yet the reproduction of the group’s photomontages in the pages of long-­standing and influential journals such as Domus and Casabella helped propel Superstudio from the relatively insular confines of Florence to widespread international reception.1 Through subsequent reproduction and display they have become enduring references within architectural culture. Founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and quickly joined by Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, and Roberto Magris, Superstudio crystallized out of the student milieu at the Architectural Faculty of the University of Florence.2 An intensive reflection on the image was evident from the beginning, written into the opening lines of the “Superarchitecture” manifesto distributed in poster form in 1967, and often cited as a founding text. “The new objects,” it declared, “are at once things and images of things: the dream car is a car and 241

the projection of a car, the new monument is the image of the monument.”3 The manifesto’s account of the collapse of object into image and of image into monument remained ambiguous. Was the group offering a critical diagnosis, akin to Debord’s contemporaneous theory of the spectacle, in which the effects of capitalism were understood in terms of the reduction of objects and human relationships to alienated visual semblances? Or did the capacity for images to take on the type of power formerly reserved for monuments mark a new and different kind of opening for architectural thinking and practice? Super­studio remained deliberately unclear on this question, developing opera­tions that looked to the power of such hybrid image-­objects without relinquishing an awareness of the image’s capacity for reification and deception. Advancing their positions through projects designed expressly for reproduction in magazines, films, and exhibitions, their goal was nonetheless to produce effects that extended well beyond such media. Superstudio’s projects aimed to intervene in, and feed from, the institutional authority commanded by the dominant publications, galleries, and schools, at the very moment that these institutions were being destabilized by emerging forms of political participation and new means of electronic, audiovisual communication. Critics on very different ends of the political spectrum were distrustful of Superstudio’s explicitly imagistic tactics. Manfredo Tafuri dismissed Superstudio’s entire body of work as an irresponsible “intellectual playfulness . . . deduced from a hasty reading of New Left reviews,” little more than an “astute marketing operation” for the group’s objects and furniture.4 From an opposite position, Colin Rowe arrived at a related conclusion. Describing a photo­montage from the group’s film Supersurface, he saw an opening onto the most debased environmental simulacra, a “green light for the Disney-­like entrepreneurs of the future.”5 Yet not all verdicts were hostile. The Florentine critic Giovanni Klaus Koenig defended the validity of the group’s “theoretical-­ graphic activity” as a mode of architectural thinking that flourished in times of crisis, comparing Superstudio’s Continuous Monument to the publications of Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier in the aftermath of World War  I.6 Kenneth Frampton lauded Superstudio’s critical reflection on advanced technology, praising the Continuous Monument as a “metaphysical image . . . as fleeting and as cryptic as the Suprematist monuments of Kazimir Malevich or the ‘wrapped’ buildings of Christo.”7 The most potent reception, however, came from other young architects in Europe, Japan, and America, particularly an emerging generation of students and teachers at London’s Architectural Association, which included Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Elia Zenghelis.8 242 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

Recent scholarship has reassessed the work of Superstudio, Archizoom, and other groups active in the Florentine scene, reopening Tafuri’s dismissal of the supposedly “hasty” relationship of these practices to the period’s political discourses.9 Felicity D. Scott has reassessed the tactics of Superstudio and Archizoom in relation to the “refusal of work” advanced by theorists associated with the Italian workerist and Autonoma movements, such as Mario Tronti and Paolo Virno. Their project, she argues, was as one of engaged withdrawal from the reigning conditions of intellectual work within late capi­ talism.10 While Superstudio spoke explicitly about “a general process of reduction,” the significance of such a withdrawal and the group’s relationship to the period’s left-­wing politics has never been straightforward.11 This chapter probes the role of montage within such a “general process.” Together with reduction there was also an effort to reframe the intellectual work of designing objects, interiors, and buildings, which aligned these with the production

FIGURE 5.1.

Superstudio, The Continuous Monument (In the Sahara Desert), 1969. Ink, tape, and paper on printed paper. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

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and circulation of speculative narrative scenarios concerning architectural culture. Contemporaneous with, yet independent of, the rise of scenario metho­dologies in management circles and think tanks, Superstudio developed what might be called counterscenarios, a mode of “what if” thinking linked to subversion rather than strategic planning.12 Such a tactic was developed in what is arguably the group’s most influential legacy—­the manner in which they narrativized the use of the architectural perspective. Superstudio mobilized photo­montage and filmic montage to set striking perspectives in motion, insisting that these function not as singular views but as frames within expanded, filmic sequences circulated via storyboards, films, lectures, prints, and articles.13 Such scenario perspectives were designed to be read as much as they were to be seen. Continually inserted and repositioned within discourse by means of articles, voice-­over, extended captions, and overprinted texts—­such counterscenarios articulated alternative emplotments of key disciplinary narratives. While the group’s photomontages continue to circulate in architectural culture and beyond, the physical procedures used to construct them and their discursive entanglements have fallen from view.14 The following chapter aims to recover these montages as part of a theoretical practice, by looking more closely at the techniques used to assemble the photomontages and by retracing the agonistic debates in which they aimed to do their work. Superstudio’s ambitions were critical yet in a mode that was neither one of opposition nor of negation but of deliberate exaggeration and exacerbation. Such exacerbation assembled elements from architectural histories and the architectural press, together with advertisements, illustrated weeklies, anthropology, and esoteric literature. At a moment when dominant modernist terms such as structure and space were challenged by those of surface and information, the group’s montages, exhibitions, and films seized overdetermined figure of the grid to subvert and renarrate this conspicuous element of late modern architecture.15 The results were paradoxical. Superstudio’s scenarios envisioned architectural grids extended to a planetary scale, yet narrated this expansion as part of a process of reduction and disappearance.16

Participatory Space In the charged summer of 1968, Casabella published an account of an experimental studio conducted at Florence’s Faculty of Architecture during the previous academic year.17 The course’s professor, the architect Leonardo Savioli, described the studio’s aims together with his teaching assistant, a for-

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mer student and founder of Superstudio, Adolfo Natalini. Together with eight other assistants and a host of collaborators coming from Rome, Turin, and Milan, the course included over 250 students organized into collaborative working groups. The course has been cited as a crucible for the emergence of a movement that would come to be called “Radical Architecture.”18 It included not only members of Superstudio and Archizoom but a host of less well-­known groups founded by students from the course, including Gruppo 9999, UFO, and Ziggurat.19 The article featured numerous large black-­and-­ white photographs of models attributed to the student groups, almost all of which consisted of complex metal or plastic frameworks, trusses, and grids shot at close range, from oblique angles, in stark lighting against black shadowless backgrounds. The resulting images confounded any clear indication of scale and intensified the feeling that one was in the space of the model, rather than simply looking at it. The shots emulated qualities popularized in photographs of Constant’s New Babylon (1959–­68), Mike Webb’s Sin Center (1961), and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace (1965)—­models of projects whose innovative structural frames also appeared to float in a dark space of uncertain depth. Yet, the photographs in Casabella were also subtly different.20 Beyond the uncertain sense of scale and the feeling of proximity, the photographs register the sheer material heterogeneity of these constructions, which were conspicuously assembled from domestic and industrial goods. Bartolini, Belini, Carletti, Micheli, Montanari, Moraja, and Pinagli’s project for a “node in an urban network” featured metal rods and gears, clear and colored plastic tubing, copper conduits, and corrugated plastic hosing. Alderighi, Boniforti, Ghinoi, Mamini, Negrin, and Screti’s project consisted of an internally mirrored cube housing an endlessly reflected Coca-­Cola bottle, which they described as a “monument to the present, to lost time, to all the coke drunk in the world, and to the advent of an undrinkable beverage.” Gherardi, Pacini, Poli, Spinelli, and Russo’s project for a drive-­in ferris wheel was assembled from bicycle wheels, welded industrial mesh, metal tubing, electric light, colored plastic, and toy cars.21 Flaunting their aversion to the tradition of wooden models, which had been a requirement for thesis projects in the Florence Faculty up until a few years earlier the groups turned against the reigning ideas of mastery and craftsmanship to embrace a wider spectrum of materials as well as a different understanding of a model’s function.22 No longer strictly a scalar representation of a building, the models took on the ambiguous qualities of the image-­objects described in the manifesto of the nascent “super architecture” movement that spring.

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FIGURE 5.2.

Page spread from Casabella 326 (July 1968), featuring a collaborative work by students at the Florence Faculty of Architecture. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Natalini’s text outlined the studio’s operational lexicon: Disorientation, transposition of scale, assemblage, montage, decomposition, repetition, iteration, and contamination, are terms that have been continuously used. . . . With “assemblage,” pieces that have been produced or recuperated are joined together by establishing new relationships and stimulating new mental associations; the mechanical logic at the root of “montage” reveals at once the parts and the formative process.23

Natalini’s list sought to link studio teaching more closely to procedures drawn from an expanded collage-­montage paradigm, and more particularly to pop art. Yet the emphasis accorded to assemblage and montage goes beyond references to contemporary art and highlights dynamics that I have been retracing throughout the previous chapters, namely, an effort to envision and rethink the meaning and role of assembly in a condition defined by advanced industrialization and the emergence of new electronic communication technologies. This expanded set of operations raised fundamental questions 246 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

about the architect’s intellectual work, a problem intimately connected to the course’s central hypothesis. As described by Savioli, the problem was not about structure, typology, or composition but about research into operations and procedures suited to the design of what he called the “spazio di coinvolgimento,” a space of involvement or participation.24 The meaning of participation—­a pervasive and ambiguous term during this period, and one we have encountered before—­took on at least three senses in this pedagogical experiment. The first stemmed from the demand for collaborative group work among the students. The demand for an alternative to individualized study emerged as key during the student protests within the Florence Architecture Faculty, which, like the faculties of Rome, Turin, and Milan, flared up with intensity in 1963–­64 and again in the spring of 1968.25 In 1964 the students in Florence turned to the tactic of occupying the rector’s office, a form of group action that moved away from models of political participation through elected student bodies.26 As two Florentine students, Pizziolo and Di Cristina, wrote in Casabella continuità after the 1964 occupations, it was such “gruppi di studio” that were instrumental in rupturing “the old balance of relations between authoritarians and the cultural agnosticism of comfort, giving the glimpse of a different form of school.”27 Shortly after the occupations of 1964, Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Massimo Morrozzi, Ali Navai, Sergio Pastonini, Piero Spagna, and Toraldo di Francia petitioned the school to be able to present a single collaboratively authored design project for their exam that year.28 The project, dubbed La Città Estrusa (The Extruded City) projected a polychrome assembly line–­city that combined the functions of production, consumption, education, and culture into a single megastructure stretching from Florence to Pistoia, some forty kilometers distant.29 The recourse to group work, the gargantuan scale of the project, the polemical mode of presentation, and the wholesale effort to question “functionalist discourse” provoked a conflict with the faculty.30 A model produced for the course was retrospectively exhibited at the second Superarchitecture exhibition in Modena in 1967, and inscribing it within the emergence of the Superstudio and Archizoom groups. Aiming to polemi­cally exceed contemporary Italian debates over urban and territorial planning, the project advanced a tactic that became central to the subsequent work of both groups—­linking image-­objects to scenarios that deliberately exaggerated and exacerbated an existing discourse.31 While in 1964 the ability to work collaboratively was forced by the students, by 1966–­67 Savioli, with assistance from members of the nascent Superstudio and Archizoom groups, had made this type of work central to the very format of the pedagogy. 247 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

In addition to the emphasis on group work, a second sense of participation, not immediately reconciled with the first, concerned the kinds of involvement associated with semiotic and phenomenological fluidity. This second sense served as a bridge between student efforts to change the structure of teaching and claims that sought to shift concepts of space within the discipline. “One of the fundamental tasks of the architect today,” Savioli wrote, was “identifying all the possible operations which are capable of unblocking the fixity, the schematicity, and the peremptory nature of contemporary urban-­architectonic space, in which the so-­called user today finds himself in the position of having to undergo all that is prepared, pre-­ordained, fixed, and pre-­established.”32 Savioli’s search for operations that could move the architect away from an enduring concern with fixity and stability—­and the bureaucratic norms to which these were connected—­echoed the wider period preoccupation with expenda­bility, ephemerality, and transformability. Yet, rather than function or technology, Savioli’s participatory space hinged on signification. Space, he argued, “should lose its traditional symbolic significance,” a significance epito­mized by the tendency to understand space in terms of a “definitely constituted image.”33 Savioli’s search for operations capable of eroding fixity in favor of greater fluidity sought to evade what he called the “authority of typological image.” The irregular openings, contrasting textures, and sculptural plasticity of the poured concrete forms in his apartments on Florence’s Via Piagentina (1963–­67) can be seen in light of his effort to elude “the indisputability of an image that imprints itself definitively in the memory.”34 Image was a term as central to the architectural discourse in Florence as it was in London, yet for Savioli it was largely the opposite of what it had been for Reyner Banham. The search for a participatory space resisted the demand for “memorability,” the very quality that had been central to Banham’s theory of the New Brutalist image.35 Savioli’s emphasis on signification echoed the already advanced discussions of semiotics in the Florence Faculty of Architecture, where figures like Gillo Dorfles and Umberto Eco taught.36 Yet it was also distinct from Eco’s The Open Work (1962), which had advanced an influential interdisciplinary approach to the lack of closure, completeness, and absoluteness characteristic of postwar music, art, and literature. Rather than a form definitely imposed on matter, Eco saw the “open” work as analogous to a “construction kit,” a set of elements whose relationships and configuration would be completed by the performer or spectator.37 Just as a text or a score could be remade through the interpretive agency of the reader or performer, so might architectural elements be reassembled, reinterpreted, and completed by an inhabitant or “user.” The younger generation’s sensibility was closer to Eco’s 248 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

construction kit—­an analogy that echoed the flexible elements of Banham’s clip-­on architecture, the demountable pneumatic structures of Utopie, or the cybernetically responsive assemblies of Price or Archigram—­than it was to Savioli’s poetics of form, yet his notion that a different kind of image might help bring about a “new relationship between the user and his space” retained a magnetic attraction.38 The desire to elude the fixity of the image and its capacity to be imprinted in the collective memory came together with a third sense of participation, FIGURE 5.3. Leonardo

Savioli and Danilo Santi, Via Piagentina Apartments, Florence, 1964–­67. Copyright Scala/ARS.

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one concerned with the experience of emerging immersive, electronic, audio­visual media. Savioli’s interest in a fluid and phenomenologically rich involvement was anchored in the discourse surrounding Arte Informale—­ reflecting his activities as a painter as well as an architect. For the younger generation, the problem of participatory space was attuned to the languages of consumption addressed by pop and to the cybernetic principles implied in much kinetic art (or Arte Programmata, as the phenomenon was known in Italy).39 These potentially incompatible outlooks found a zone of accommodation in the somewhat unlikely setting of the Piper clubs, the program that served as the studio’s brief. Beginning in 1965 in Rome, and quickly spreading to Florence, Turin, and Rimini, the Pipers were deliberately vague entities, a hybrid of discothèque, concert venue, gallery, club, and performance space.40 In 1965–­66, the same moment that they were advocating for collective work within the faculty, Toraldo di Francia, Natalini, Branzi, and Morrozzi convinced the proprietor of a local hall on the outskirts of Florence to let them temporarily convert the interior into a Piper by means of lightweight materials and audiovisual media, including Kodak carousel projectors, wall paintings, lighting, colors, graffiti, and inflatables.41 The project, while short-­lived, was extended in Savioli’s adoption of the Piper phenomenon as a model for the 1966–­67 course.42 There is a remarkable parallel between Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton’s involvement with the Light/Sound Workshop, examined in chapter 2, and Natalini and Toraldo di Francia’s involvement with the Piper club phenomenon. Both were ephemeral endeavors that deployed a fluid conception of audiovisual, environmental montage to break down boundaries between media, between disciplines, as well as between performers and audience, and both sought to create architecture from materials not deemed architectural. Whereas Archigram and the Light/Sound Workshop spoke of arenas, labyrinths, and circuses, and developed electronic audiovisual assemblies to make urban intensity mobile and portable, the interactive, multisensory interiors of the Piper clubs suggested a heterotopic alternative to the city.43 Initially ad hoc occupations, the interiors of both clubs became ambitious test beds for more durable electronic, audio-­visual assemblages. In addition to the use of amplified sound, multiple projections (35 mm slides and film), and programmed lighting machines, the kit of elements came to include movable reflective partitions, staircases that reacted to movement, reconfigurable modular seating, demountable space-­frame systems, screens, stages, curtains, amplifiers, and control towers.44 The reactions of writers and critics to such immersive interiors betrays a 250 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

mixture of euphoria and anxiety. The experience of multimedia, multisensory immersion, on the one hand, was heralded as a release into a form of synesthetic, intersubjective plenitude, an experience of simultaneity, extension, and imaginary unity reminiscent of the more exultant writings of Marshall McLuhan about electronic communications networks.45 As Branden Joseph has argued, McLuhanesque interpretations of Andy Warhol’s contemporaneous Exploding Plastic Inevitable have obscured the equally pronounced

FIGURE 5.4. The

Living Theater at the Piper Pluri Club, Turin, 1966. Pietro De Rossi, Giorgio Cerretti, and Riccardo, architects. Photograph by Renato Rinaldi. Copyright Pietro De Rossi.

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sense of violent disturbance felt by many critics, who described a menacing sense of absorption in, and domination by, media apparatuses designed to overload the senses.46 Aspects of both of these reactions can be heard in the critic Tommaso Trini’s account of Rimini’s Altro Mondo Club, which highlighted the disruptive and disorienting combinations of lights, images, and sounds, yet which also pointed to the potential for regeneration through immersion in “electro-­acoustic energy.”47 Trini described the club as “half airplane hangar for acrobatic amusement and half assembly line for psychic circuits,”48 and indeed the Altro Mondo was situated in a large-­span windowless container of the type used for factories (Plate 36). Once again we encounter the complementary relationship between the generic, unobstructed, long-­span structures conceived for mass production and the densely saturated, reconfigurable environmental montage that articulated and defined their interior (Plate 37). Yet to describe this new electronic, audiovisual experience as an assembly line for “psychic circuits” was something else. Raising the specter of automation and automatism, Trini suggested that the “other world” was not an escape from work but a site of production dependent on the internalization of electronic audiovisual media. Natalini’s remarks on the studio speculated about precisely such forms of internalization: To the revision of the traditional repertoire brought about by new technological achievements, there is added the absorption [l’assunzione] of images from the mass media: we have, in this way, a large field of choices and we are able to adopt [assumere] a new, free, and constructive behavior [comportamento libero e costruttivo] (through criticism, play, irony, and the recovery of reality). . . . All the operations converge in the construction of the “internal landscape,” and the human microcosm truly becomes a model of the total reality.49

The verb assumere recurs twice in Natalini’s description, suggesting that images and stimuli were less external representations distinct from the spectator than things or effects absorbed and adopted by them. The mechanical analogies carried by assemblage and montage in Natalini’s lexicon can be seen in a particular light; the optical, acoustic, and psychological effects of electronic audiovisual media absorbed by the subject resulted not only in destabilization and disorientation but spurred a new type of “constructive behavior.” The result was an electronically intensified and extended i­ nteriority—­an “internal landscape” that was a model of a larger, “total” reality. Such an inte252 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

rior was evidently paradoxical; a larger spatial experience in which the oppositions between inside and outside, full and empty, were breaking down.50 It was in this dual sense that such an interiorized landscape could be presented as a model; simultaneously a microcosm of new behaviors associated with a global network of electronic communication, and a reconfigurable kit of media elements—­screens, image sequences, projectors, amp­lifiers, sounds, and space frames—­that could be manipulated, their effects studied, altered, and replicated.51

Technomorphism If the interest in such participatory spaces was one pole of the group’s theoretical interests, another was a reflection on architectural culture’s mimetic relationship to machine forms, which the group dubbed “technomorphism.” A key site for this reflection was Toraldo di Francia’s 1967 thesis project for a Holiday Machine projected on a coastal site in Calabria, which reflected on the potentials of technology transfer. The project’s elaborate section appropriated features of the Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, and reworked these into a mechanism for concentrating the movement of tourists. Here technomorphic architecture appeared reminiscent of Hans Hollein’s transpositions; a transformation of technological purpose was visual­ized by displacing a technological form from one landscape to another. Toraldo di Francia presented the project to the jury as a visual sequence, via a series of slide projections of large-­format drawings and photomontages that narrated the abrupt insertion of this machine within the existing topography.52 The most extensive account of technomorphism was developed in an overlooked, yet crucial, text: Natalini and Toraldo di Francia’s 1969 “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo” (“From Industry to Technomorphism”).53 Motivated by a skepticism about the “myth of the machine” as a model for the functionalist rhetoric of the modern movement, the article retraced a historical dialectic between an architecture of industrial materials and the look of machines. Constructing an account that ran from the Crystal Palace through late nineteenth-­century world’s fairs, to the work of Tony Garnier, Gropius, Vladi­mir Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Gruppo 7, Buckminster Fuller, Konrad Wachsmann, Hollein and Walter Pichler, metabolism, Price, and Archigram, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo” might be read as a response to Banham’s “A Clip-­On Architecture,” which Natalini and Toraldo di Francia quoted at length in their text. Central to their notion of technomorphism was the idea that the compositional processes of the modern movement were being 253 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

defined by an increasingly mimetic relationship to industrial machines. Here the operational lexicon that Natalini proposed for the Savioli studio returned as a description of technomorphic architecture: The most striking attributes, those that lead us to define such a [technomophic] architecture, are compositional processes such as montage, assemblage, repetition, and the transposition of scale. Architecture absorbs methods of composition from industrial processes and in turn exhibits these. The machine that produces objects is replaced by the object in the image of the machine.54

Paradoxically, the more architectural composition internalized industrial processes, the more the machine as a model of a rational, functional integrity was eclipsed, replaced by industrial objects that assumed only the external semblance of the machine. Where Banham had feared a closer relationship between architecture and information technology might lead to an absence of visual legibility, Natalini and Toraldo di Francia argued that the architecture of technology was shaped by an ambiguous and superficial mimesis in which “buildings look like machines and machines look like buildings.”55 The latter tendency was illustrated by references to the cubic Vertical Assembly Building and the spherical Chinon Nuclear Reactor in France; complex technological apparatuses whose external geometries made them remi­ niscent of the neoclassical monuments of Étienne-­Louis Boullée.56 Arata Isozaki’s Fukuoka Mutual Bank, Oita (1967), and James Stirling’s Leicester University Engineering Building (1963) represented a contrasting tendency. If these buildings resembled machines, it was because they were rendered less “from the most advanced technical means” than “from the conscious employment of the world of mechanical images already entered into the common vocabu­lary.”57 The desire to appropriate the most technically advanced parts, principles, and methods from the automobile industry had the opposite problem, in that it “tended to glorify the problem of assembly, while separating it from production and from the presence of humbler components, extraneous to the industrial sphere.” In contrast to Banham’s argument that a new image of an architecture of technology needed to be envisioned from the assembly of advanced technological elements drawn from different domains, Natalini and Toraldo di Francia advocated a self-­ critical reflection on the power that an iconography of technology exerted within the discipline.58 The blankness and serial repetition found in Toraldo di Francia’s early photomontages can be interpreted as an alternative both to 254 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.5. Cristiano

Toraldo di Francia, Holiday Machine at Tropea, Calabria, 1968. Thesis project submitted to the Florence Faculty of Architecture. Copyright Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Copyright CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

“glorified” problems of assembly and to the recombination of architectural culture’s familiar mechanical vocabulary. A key to Natalini and Toraldo di Francia’s analysis of technology can be found in the writings of Giulio Carlo Argan, which they cited in “From Industry to Technomorphism.” In particular, they responded to Argan’s theorization of industrialized building, put forward in the historian’s introduction to the Italian edition of Konrad Wachsmann’s The Turning Point in Building (1960).59 For Argan, Wachsmann’s space-­frame systems were exemplary at the level of architectural method.60 The virtue of the radical reduction of architecture to a system of small-­scale joints and struts lay in its opposition to a resurgent form of technological monumentality in the twentieth century. In a passage quoted by Natalini and Toraldo di Francia, Argan argued: Modern architecture tends programmatically toward the elimination of the monumental: functionalism was the opposite of baroque monumentality in which precise ideological contents were represented plastically. Modern civilization, however, expressing pride in its own functionalism, has made technology into a form of power rather than an instrument; and an other monumentality is reborn and celebrates function as if it were a ritual, mythologizing it into a symbol.61

For Argan, monumentality had nothing to do with size. Contrasting Wachsmann’s designs for massive hangars to Donato Bramante’s Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio (1508), he argued that what made Bramante’s Tempietto monumental was its aspiration to define a form whose validity would be universal, absolute, and eternal. Wachsmann’s building systems, by contrast, remained indeterminate, demountable instruments, conceived for contingency, indeterminate extension, and impermanence. Interpreting Wachsmann’s modules through a dialectical materialist opposition of quantity and quality, Argan argued that the methodical nature of the system’s basic modules­fused quantitative necessity (unlimited extension and repeatability of mass production) with qualitative plastic freedom. “In the end quality is determined from the methodical study of quantitative data, such that it can be said that Wachsmann’s structures composed from simple elements represent the achievement, at least in the experimental phase, of a point of fusion between quality and quantity.”62 Argan’s dialectics cast Wachsmann’s industrialized kit of reconfigurable parts in terms of fusion and synthesis, opening a path toward a higher form of development, not only for building, as Wachsmann argued, but, for the whole of “contemporary culture.”63 256 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

The Continuous Monument Argan was silent about the fact that the most extensive of Wachsmann’s space-­frame systems were instruments developed for the United States Air Force. The new direction that emerges in Superstudio’s work in 1969 might be seen as a response to such a silence, one that provocatively collapsed the contradictions—­between monumentality and technology, power and instrument, quantity and quality—­central to Argan’s narrative of historical progress. The Continuous Monument project envisioned a global, technological monumentality, a scenario in which any notion of dialectical synthesis was abandoned. By contrast, the contingency, infinite extensibility, and indeterminacy of Wachsmann’s space frames came to appear as a new type of monu­mentality, the very expression of what they referred to as “technological imperialism.” First presented at the 1969 Trigon biennial in Graz, and subsequently published as a series of photomontages in the December 1969 issue of ­Domus in an article titled “Discorsi per immagini,” the Continuous Monu­ ment marked a significant break both from the group’s engagement with the design of participatory spaces and its notion of evasion as a design strategy.64 As early as the Superarchitettura exhibitions of 1966–­67 the group’s designs highlighted a mode of figurative assembly constrained by five basic geometric elements: the cube, the rainbow, the cloud, the ziggurat, and the wave.65 Such a catalog restaged, in an ironic pop idiom, a discourse of primary forms advanced by purism four decades earlier, in which a set of basic geometric building blocks—­the cylinder, pyramid, cube, paralleliped, and sphere—­were understood to provoke universal “primary sensations.” In 1969 the recombination of such polychromatic forms that had defined Superstudio’s furniture, interiors, drawings, and lamps was abruptly displaced by a monochromatic and deliberately generic grid pattern. Formulated as serial permutations and titled the “Catalogue of Histograms,” the shift from a table of type-­elements to a catalog of permutations extruded from the cultural technology of the grid marked a shift in thinking about assembly.66 Assembly no longer concerned composite figures produced by combining primary building blocks, rather it concerned the arrangement and positioning of three-dimensional forms derived from a two-dimensional grid surface.67 This reductive iconoclastic gesture was more complicated than its spare presentation let on. The advent of the histograms also corresponded with the group’s more intensive investment in producing photomontages and films. The grid system of the histograms unified the exterior appearance of a series 257 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.6.

Superstudio, Tavola Sinottica, 1968. Colored pencil on paper. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

of permutational forms, yet it was also intimately bound up with producing an image of continuity within the space of media, in the form of prints, story­ boards, articles, exhibitions, and lectures. The grid was both a system and a sign, one that aimed to draw together an increasingly varied and disparate set of activities and interests. The project known as the Continuous Monument developed through brief texts and the production of more than thirty photomontages during a period of just over a year.68 Gridded volumes reminiscent of viaducts or cruciform bridges appeared in the deserts of the American Southwest or on the placid shores of an alpine lake in Switzerland (Plate 38). Such a mode was not haphazard but essential. Photomontage was a way to format the grid for photo­ mechanical circulation via articles, magazines covers, prints, storyboards, and exhibitions. It was also—­as the title of both Archizoom’s and Super­ studio’s articles in Domus indicated—­part of an effort to develop a “discorsi per immagini,” at once a reflection on the potency of images in architectural culture and a way to advance discourse through images. The photomontages

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FIGURE 5.7. Le Corbusier, Lesson of Rome, detail of page layout from Vers une architecture, 1923. Courtesy of BNF, Paris. Copyright F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

produced by Frassinelli, Natalini, and Toraldo di Francia were also a central mode of collaboration essential to the work’s conceptual development. While the images were assembled at individual drawing boards, they emerged out of a shared practice of collecting and archiving tear sheets extracted from a wide range of printed sources. Such a collection echoed the clipping practices of John McHale and members of the Independent Group seen in chapter 1, yet with Superstudio it was less a question of juxtaposing and analyzing images on tack boards than about maintaining a visual stockpile. Filed in wooden drawers in the office, the clippings were organized into five categories—­People, Machines, Landscapes, Architecture, Arts—­as if the five primary forms of the group’s first phase were displaced by five iconographic categories (Plate 39).69 The clipping archive was motivated by the desire to have a large quantity of variations in size, color, angle, and lighting continu­ ously available. The ability to quickly test differences between similar photo­ mechanical elements was necessary for the efficient construction of vistas that adhered rigorously to the rules of perspectival projection, a distinctive quality of the group’s photomontages.70 For the Continuous Monument to 259 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.8.

Superstudio, Istogrammi d’architettura con riferimento a un reticolo transponibile in aree o scala diverse per l’edificazione di une natura serena in cui riconoscersi, Plura Edizioni, 1969. Offset lithographic print. Copyright Superstudio. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

become a scenario, rather than strictly a photomontage, the cultural technology of the grid needed to come together with an archive of print clippings, allowing the architects to achieve forms of projection that were consistent across an entire sequence of constructed scenes. While it was described as a “single design,” and as a single building, a central paradox of the Continuous Monument was that it could never appear as a single image. Continuity already implies a relationship, and in Super­studio’s case this relationship was envisioned and produced through montage. The initial presentation of the project in the catalog for the Trigon exhibition contained not one but two photomontages. In one a stark gridded structure arises perpendicular to the picture plane in the midst of a bucolic landscape on whose shore a smattering of spectators sit resting. In the second, children play obliviously in the foreground while a structure with a similar grid pattern rises at the end of a dense urban street typical of a nineteenth-­century English industrial city.71 This montage was constructed from a photograph reproduced as a full-­page illustration in Ernesto Nathan Rogers’s Casabella continuità in 1963.72 Accompanying an article on Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s enormous Park Hill complex in Sheffield, the photograph belonged to Roger Mayne’s late-­1950s series Coketown Revisited. Mayne’s photographs were in260 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

debted to Nigel Henderson’s iconic photographs of children playing in the streets of Bethnal Green, which Alison and Peter Smithson used in their “Urban Re-­identification” grid of 1953. Smith had been a student at the Architectural Association in the early 1950s, and Park Hill’s “streets in the air” were inspired by the drawings and photomontages of the Smithsons’ 1952 Golden Lane Housing project (Plate 3). More than anything it was the simple repetition of the same apparent form and pattern in two sequential images that communicated continuity. The formal and technological continuity of Super­ studio’s grid-­monument was generated by techniques of cinematic montage, a quality that appears in polemical contrast to the forms of histori­cal and urban continuity stressed by Team 10 and Rogers.73 Superstudio’s blank gridded structure inserts itself in this iconographic terrain in a manner that rudely bypassed the critical aspirations that such photographs had nurtured for the generation of Team 10, namely, that rather than impose the categori­cal urban divisions codified by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, architects might create forms that organically emerged from existing patterns of urban association.

FIGURE 5.9.

Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: Arizona Desert, 1969. Photomontage, 49.9 × 64.7 cm. Copyright Superstudio. Digital image copyright CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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FIGURE 5.10.

Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: Coketown Revisited, 1969. Photomontage. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

FIGURE 5.11. Photograph by Roger Mayne, reproduced in David Lewis and Peter Stead, “La ricostruzione delle città industriali inglesi” (“The Reconstruction of English Industrial Cities”), Casabella continuità, no. 280 (October 1963).

When Superstudio republished several photomontages in Domus, the cine­matic logic of the project became even more explicit.74 The idea of a continuous building was achieved by the side-­by-­side repetition of a common form and pattern, which appeared not as a series of projects but as a single project seen in a series of frames. The sole caption in Superstudio’s article ratified this impression, identifying a full-­page reproduction of the Continuous Monument crossing Lower Manhattan as “an image from a film by Superstudio currently in production.”76 By contrast, Archizoom’s photomontages, published in a similar layout, and with the same title, were identified as views of particular projects without any notion of shared form—­a landscape ramp that extends from the earth was titled “belvedere,” while a repetitive series of enormous urban slab buildings were described as “parallel neighborhoods for Berlin.” The five photomontages Superstudio published in Domus displayed a strict formal consistency; the grids inserted into the photographs either traverse from one edge of the frame to another, or recede toward the photograph’s vanishing point. Such composition required a careful and consistent adjustment of the grid to the scale and perspective of each photographic landscape. While such photomontages might appear to place an architectural object in a location, the effect was arguably the reverse; the repetition of the grid-­monument enabled readers to conceive of entirely distinct landscapes cut from different sources as part of one continuous project. If perspectival continuity was one crucial technique through which a sense of cinematic continuity was achieved, another was the development of narrative and sequential montage through the use of storyboards. One of the earliest, the story­board for Journey in the Regions of Reason (Viaggi nelle regioni della ­ragione) (1969) presented the group’s synoptic table of five typical elements as the point of departure for a series of episodes that scenarized the histori­cal development of order and form in the empty space of the desert.76 The storyboard Mobili di primavera (1969) presented the group’s Luxor furniture series, created with Poltronova in 1969, through the rubric: “how to furnish the desert.”77 Not unlike Archigram’s use of sequence drawings to indicate the changing configuration of events within a space, such storyboards were a way to temporalize drawing. Yet unlike Archigram, the storyboards developed by Superstudio used sequences not to indicate the changeable configuration of an assemblage but to but to reformat and insert their design drawings within a narrative concerning architectural modernism. The storyboard went hand in hand with the group’s effort to narrativize drawing and design work, creating scenarios whose temporality was acutely paradoxical. Such a paradoxical temporality appears in the juxtaposition of monuments 263 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.12.

Superstudio and Archizoom Associati, page spreads for “Discorsi per immagini,” Domus, December 1969. Copyright Superstudio Archive and Archi­zoom Associati. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

and photomontages in Superstudio’s article “Discorsi per immagini.” A careful symmetry was used to juxtapose the photomontages on the bottom half of the page with the photographs of buildings and monuments—­from Stonehenge to NASA’s Vertical Assembly Building—­on the top. Such an ambiguous transition was stabilized in a manner analogous to the cinematic technique 264 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

known as a match cut, or graphic match: an abrupt cut between entirely different frames that has been rendered congruous by using a similar graphic form on either side of the cut, establishing a visual continuity that attenuates the break. The technique has frequently been used to suggest a para­doxical continuation between entirely distant moments in narrative time. In “Discorsi 265 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

per immagini” the abrupt shift between top and bottom, and between Roman monument and space age technology, was a­ nalogous—­a conceptual and graphic continuity that collapsed the duration of historical time into an abrupt jump between images. At a purely visual level, the match cut established the germ of a scenario, the endless extension of the continuous monu­ment implied a temporality in which dialectical development had ceased, in which the prehistorical and the “space age” appeared strangely contemporaneous.78 If the image discourse in Domus produced a sense of contemporaneity between advanced technology and archaic monuments, in the text for the Trigon cata­ log this was voiced in terms of an inevitable teleological development, as “an architecture that arises as a single, continuous environment: the earth, through technology, culture, and all other inevitable forces, will be rendered homogenous.”79 The Domus text once again described a temporality in which, contrary to Argan’s dialectical materialism, quantity was not synthesized with quality; rather, technological modernization brutally eliminated the qualitative differences of region, nation, or culture. Eliminating mirages and illusions of spontaneous architecture, sensitive architecture, architecture without architects, biological and fantastic architecture, we turn towards the “continuous monument”: an architecture emerging uniformly in a single continuous environment: the earth rendered uniform by technology, by culture, and by all the inevitable imperialisms.80

The temporal collapse generated by such a layout troubled the teleological claims that had been central to a discourse of progress within the modern movement. It was precisely this skepticism about progress that deflated the capacity for photomontage to be read as a projection of a utopian future. As Archizoom member Andrea Branzi noted of the photomontages that both groups realized at this moment, the aim was not to “put forward a different world from the present one, but rather [to] present the existing one at a more advanced level of cognition.”81 The paradoxical temporality latent in the initial presentation of the Continuous Monument became more evident in the film’s storyboard, in which aspects of Journey in the Regions of Reason and Springtime Furnishings were incorporated. Prepared as a small dyeline-­printed booklet dated May 1969, it was first published in Tokyo in Japan Interior Design in 1970, and in Casabella in 1971.82 From the storyboard one understands that the series of photo­montages that have come to stand for the Continuous Monument were 266 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

conceived for an intense montage sequence that was to serve as the film’s crescendo and climax (Plate 40).83 The first three-­quarters of the projected film narrated the development of architectural form and was to open with a rapid-­fire inventory of systems of order—­from models of the cosmos to the proportions of the human body. The sequence on order was to be followed by the series of monuments featured in “Discorsi per immagini,” in which the logic of the match cut plays out more fully—­the cubic form of the Kaaba at Mecca cuts to the Vertical Assembly Building, and a shot of the Pont du Gard cuts to a highway cloverleaf in Southern California. The ensuing sequences restate a narrative about the development of form in the space of the desert, from a pseudobiblical “genesis” of geometrical solids to a “drive-­in museum of architecture,” to a sequence titled “How to Illuminate the Desert,” in which a drawing of one of Superstudio’s lamps produces “images of dream architecture.” The dream architecture that follows appears to retrace Emil Kaufmann’s history of modern architecture in reverse, from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (1935) to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), to Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton (1784), an abbreviated film within a film.84 The concluding frame of the sequence abruptly departs from history and alludes to the present—­in which an incongruous multitude, described as “nomads, white-­collar workers on holiday, and peace demonstrators,” pass beneath another enlarged lamp presented as a “triumphal arch” of glowing neon tubes. This ironic allusion to the present quickly faded to black. Out of a mysterious darkness a black rectangle was to appear on a white ground. The accompanying voice-­over stated: “All we have loved is lost, we are now in the desert. Before us is but a square.” The voice was Kazimir Malevich’s; in this textual montage, the painter’s description of his 1915 painting Black Square appeared to comment on the advent of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument.85 A series of traveling shots revealed a further set of architectural “apparitions”—­a door, a corridor, a floating stone, and walls, reminiscent of both suprematist compositions and the photographs of land art frequently published in the pages of Domus at this time.86 The sequence concluded with a passage through a dark tunnel. The film’s narrative, running from the mythical origins of order to geometry, monumental architecture, the Enlightenment, and the histori­cal avant-­gardes appeared less as a series of dialectical conflicts than as a series of stage sets, mirages, and dreams erected within a tabula rasa, a space suggested by the simplest graphic means—­a horizontal line on a piece of p ­ aper. Rather than a space existing beyond the limits of modernity and modernization, here the desert appears as a site of emptiness and possibility within the destructive leveling and evacuation wrought by modernization itself. 267 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

The photomontages of the Continuous Monument were to appear in quick succession after the end of the tunnel sequence. The storyboard indicates a jump-­cut from the tunnel to a view of the planet from outer space. A deterritorialized, planetary gaze, rather than that of the grounded viewer, establishes the project’s frame of reference. From an initial pan up across the lakeshore photomontage included in the Trigon catalog, the sequence was to accelerate at a rapid, staccato pace, passing from deserts to alpine landscapes, ancient monuments, and cities.87 If the first three-­quarters of the film narrated the development of a range of abstract forms, the final section abandons narrative for parataxis, a succession of one image after another that was described in the voice-­over as “some random images, as disquieting as all those postcards bearing ‘greetings from.’ ”88 The sequence was to end with a slow zoom into the Continuous Monument as it appeared to recede into the distance across an aerial panorama of Lower Manhattan, the same image reproduced in Domus in 1969 (Plate 41). The photomontage, titled New New York, was constructed from the vantage point of an extreme wide-­angle aerial view. The viewer sees the Continuous Monument from above, its surface appearing mirror-­like rather than gridded. The paper used to create the image was carefully modulated with graphite and colored pencil to suggest shadows and reflections optically binding it to the photographic surrounding. Such an effort to render atmosphere within the photomontage recalls the painterly touch mobilized in Friedrich von Thiersch’s overpaintings of photographs, or in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s effort to convey reflections in the early photo­ montages of glass buildings. It was an atmospheric effect that became increasingly important to the group’s photomontages. Rendering the insertion visually seamless proceeded through a more aggressive intervention into the materiality of the photographic support. In the foreground, a section of skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan—­to be “preserved in memory of a time when cities were built with no single plan”—­were safeguarded by literally being cut out, folded up, and tucked through the paper of the monument, an anomalous exception to the Continuous Monument’s typical indifference to its surroundings.89 In such an image, the most elaborate and invasive technological monument appears as a self-­effacing reflection of its surroundings. It was precisely such indifference that Superstudio saw as the most impor­ tant element of the histograms, which the group described as part of a search for “a design that when transported remains identical to itself, changing scale or meaning without trauma or incident. This immutability interests us: the search for an image that is ‘impassible and inalterable.”90 While associated with a search for a system that would be autonomous and universal, Super268 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

studio’s montages reveal something else: a grid whose claim to autonomy was structurally dependent on, rather than simply against, consumer culture. The photomontages that conveyed this architecture of formal immutability—­ “identical to itself” despite alteration in scale, context, or meaning—­were physically constructed from mass cultural advertisements, magazine illustrations, posters, and postcards. New New York, for instance, was constructed from a large-­format Pan Am travel poster.91 The selection of such material was in part motivated by a desire to endow the Continuous Monument with a visual smoothness—­the scale of the poster allowed for the creation of an image that would be reduced for reproduction rather than enlarged, and thus not suffer any loss of resolution. Yet the choice was fitting for another reason. The cinematic continuity of the Continuous Monument was meant to circulate within a global architectural network defined by magazines, films, and exhibitions, a network whose members could themselves circulate because of the increasing accessibility of transcontinental jet travel.92 In the climactic final shot, the putative autonomy of the Continuous Monument was inscribed within the rhetoric of visual immediacy developed within advertising culture to promote such travel.93 The extreme wide-­angle view created an impression of both proximity and distance, a perspective in which individual, historic skyscrapers remain distinguishable beneath a distant vanishing point into which the monument disappears. Unlike the stationary view of a spectator on the ground, this elevated “view from nowhere” was the Continuous Monu­ ment’s most coherent site.

Space Electronic The general tendency to temporalize and narrativize drawing through the production of storyboards and films from 1969 to 1973 entailed a different engagement with electronic and audiovisual media, one that reflected an increasingly divided sense of the group’s intellectual work. Superstudio’s statements during this period distinguish more sharply between the design  of objects, on the one hand, and the conception and transmission of ideas, on the other. The adoption of a “single design” initially in the gridded surface of the Graz Room at Trigon 69, then in the catalog of histograms, and eventually in the Misura furniture series, enacted what they called a “technique of mini­mum effort in a general process of reduction,” a system capable of “effortlessly generating objects, furniture, environments, architecture.”94 Such a “process of reduction” alluded to a wider refusal of work in far left discourse during these years, from the “Strategy of Refusal” elaborated by Mario Tronti, 269 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

key theoretician of Italian workerism, to the Internationale Situationniste’s polemical injunction “ne travaillez jamais.” Yet in Superstudio’s case “the general process of reduction” was not a strategy for confronting wage labor, as it had been for Tronti, or a radical rejection of work as such, as with the IS. Rather, it might be understood as part of an effort to stake a claim on a division of intellectual labor.95 The effort to reduce the time devoted to the design of objects was reclaimed in forms of theoretical production, or what Natalini described in a lecture at the Architectural Association in 1971 as “the continuous production, elaboration, and transmission of ideas.”96 It was precisely in the form of scenarios that the latter production and transmission would manifest itself. Such a practice did not replace design; rather, it re-­inscribed it within potentially different pathways and modes of circulation, a means for articulating counternarratives that operated ambivalently, both in support of and at odds with the production of physical objects.97 The group’s interest in film intensified amid a period of heightened politi­ cal unrest in Italy—­which included the occupation of architecture schools and of the XIV Milan Triennale in 1968, and the wave of factory strikes in the fall of 1969 dubbed the “autunno caldo.” Yet it did not emerge from nowhere. As early as 1964, Frassinelli and Toraldo di Francia, while still students in the Faculty of Architecture, discussed making a film on the Gospel of St. Matthew, plans which were quickly scrapped when Pier Paolo Pasolini released his film on the subject in 1964.98 Toraldo di Francia’s thesis, as noted above, took the form of a quasi-­cinematic sequence of slide projections in 1967. Frassinelli’s thesis, defended the following year—­devoted to a center for anthropological studies—­presented a large model and two short films. The films have disappeared, but the storyboards in Frassinelli’s notebooks indicate that they were to be a montage of texts, diagrams, and images, drawn from Margaret Mead, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, and Niccolò Machiavelli, illustrated weekly magazines such as Paris-­Match and Oggi, stills taken in Florence’s ethnographic museum, as well as footage shot on dam sites in Nigeria obtained from his sister.99 Such an essayistic montage anticipated the format deployed in the cycle of five films the group embarked on in 1971, the Fundamental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, and Death).100 Whereas in the group’s initial research into “participatory space,” three-­dimensional montage environments were deployed as a way to model immersive, electronic “interior landscapes,” the group’s later work developed scenarios that emphasized external, global landscapes, using montage to construct films and storyboards. At once a technique for constructing a discourse addressing architectural culture and a means of its dissemination and circulation, filmic montage had the poten270 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

tial to engage a network different from the architecture faculties and from the realms of professional or little magazines. Presenting the Fundamental Acts in 1971, the group described its cycle of films as “propaganda for ideas outside of the typical channels of the architectural discipline.”101 The group’s engagement with Space Electronic, an experimental disco­ thèque, theater, and intermedia environment designed and programmed by Gruppo 9999 (Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi, and Paolo Galli) from 1969 onward was especially revealing of this shift. Space Electronic emerged from the experimental wave of Piper clubs discussed earlier, having originated in part from Fiumi and Caldini’s participation in the Savioli studio in 1966–­67. Skeptical of setting up a design office, even an alternative office on the model of Superstudio or Archizoom, Gruppo 9999 designed and operated Space Electronic as a venue for experimental practice and as a source of revenue.102 The group had a particularly strong interest in how film and slide projection could transform the perception and use of existing spaces, and staged a series of events with projectors in 1968. A year of a renewed student unrest in the Florence Architecture faculty, the 1968 protests no longer solely targeted the school but began to move into the city to stage ephemeral, yet highly visible, events, among the most memorable of which were the UFO group’s Urboeffimeri, tubular, agit-­prop inflatables used at key sites around Florence.103 Gruppo 9999’s events were less occupations of public places than efforts to transform how key urban monuments were perceived. Their “projectual happening,” staged in the middle of the night on September 28 that year, turned the beams of powerful stereopticon and overhead projectors onto the Ponte Vecchio, overlaying it with a shifting range of images, from astronauts floating in space to Los Angeles freeways, as well as a range of geometric patterns.104 It is tempting to see in such projections a trace of Savioli’s insistence on an architecture of the perceptually fluid image, one capable of disturbing the “indisputability” of Florence’s most distinct urban typology.105 In such an event, one sees how the initial emphasis on the crea­tion of intensified “interior landscapes” via electronic audiovisual media began to open onto an engagement with actual urban sites. This opening out also indicated a transformation of the Piper model, which expanded beyond a combination of music, art, theater, and projections to become a more amorphous, dispersed, and networked program. A case in point was Gruppo 9999 and Superstudio’s collaboration in August 1970 to produce a festival of events dubbed “S-­Space.” An acronym for Scuola Separata per l’Architettura Conceptuale Espansa (Separate School for Expanded Conceptual Architecture), S-­Space used the rubric of the alternative school to link a disparate program, bringing 271 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.13. Gruppo

1999/9999, Happening Progettuale, Ponte Vecchio, Florence, September 28, 1968. Copyright Gruppo 9999.

together figures and groups such as Ugo La Pietra, Ant Farm, Giuseppi Chiari, Street Farmer, Gianni Pettena, UFO, and Ziggurat.106 For the Mondial Festival organized in November 1971, they flooded Space Electronic with water, compelling visitors to cross stepping stones to enter the interior, evoking memo­ ries of the catastrophic flood in Florence five years before. The interior was continually reconfigured for the duration of the events, which included radical gardening, group body exercises, and presentations of films by the English group Street Farmer and Superstudio (Plate 42). Spreading beyond the walls of Space Electronic, S-­Space also included lectures at the Boboli Gardens, the Straw Market, and the Forte Belvedere, as well as other more furtive events, such as the “Outdoor Control of Sonorous Trees,” in which a two-­hundred-­watt amplifier wired to twenty separate points of

272 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.14. Superstudio and Gruppo 9999, flyer for Mondial Festival, 1971. Copyright Superstudio archive and Gruppo 9999. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

sound played site recordings at high volume in a forest outside Florence.107 Borrowing Fuller’s often-­cited observation that the human being’s sensory apparatus was capable of detecting only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, S-­Space declared its agenda to be the study of unperceived, invisible aspects of the environment, a realm that vastly outstripped what could be seen, heard, and touched by unaided human senses.108 The program’s flyer presented S-­Space as something between a game board and a spectral beach, a “non-­physical center of production, elaboration, and transmission of ideas, processes, events, apparitions, prophecies, memories, situations, existences.” Such an entity was at once more ephemeral and more elusive than the constantly changing multimedia interior of Space Electronic.109 With S-­Space there was both a centrifugal expansion—­the concept of a school was stretched into a loose and spontaneous set of activities and events—­and a centripetal convergence, inviting collaboration between various groups in Florence and farther afield. In this, it importantly anticipated the convergence of groups, critics, editors, and artists into the meta-­entity known as Global Tools in 1973. Formed by the members of Superstudio, Archizoom, Gruppo 9999, UFO, Strumm, and including editors such as La Pietra and Alessandro Mendini, the rubric was again pedagogical; Global Tools was a “system of laboratories” and a teaching program that aimed to return to a direct use of natural and artificial materials, to stimulate the development of “group creative activities,” and to further research into communications media.110 The emergent conception of a “non-­physical center of production” highlights how the notion of “participatory space” put forth in the Savioli studio was being displaced in the discourse of the Florentine groups by something else. Education, events, happenings, and multimedia production were no longer localized in an interior landscape or understood to preexist transmission and dissemination; rather, they were situated within and emerged from dissemination. S-­Space was a “school” that emerged out of networks of information exchange, from the alternative press network and independent film and video distribution channels to a computerized information exchange system. The production and transmission of information was increasingly conceived as a site: “The physical place in which these events are formed, composed, and realized,” Gruppo 9999 and Superstudio noted, “is the gamut of information channels which are used globally for their transmission.”111

Supersurface—­an Alternate Model of Life The sense that a social and physical initiative was located in a “gamut of information channels” anticipates thematics at the heart of the group’s films. The 274 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

group’s storyboard for the film Education hinged on a “universal information exchange system” of the kind intimated at S-­Space. It was to be composed of a central computer, a feedback unit, miniaturized access terminals, and memory banks. Pedagogical projects such as Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, David Greene’s articles in Archigram, and Fuller’s World Game all make appearances, only to be transcended by the group’s even more extreme vision. A transmitter located on the moon and connected to orbiting satellites was to envelop the entire planet in a transmission network. Each individual was to have access to “all the information in the world” via a miniaturized terminal, which was ideally to “supply information for decision making without influencing the decisions themselves.”112 The group’s vision of shared and remote access to a central computer was reminiscent of early visions of the networked computing being developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the United States Department of Defense, and which laid the foundations for the contemporary internet.113 The most widely reproduced photo­montage from the Education film sought to visualize the interplanetary network by appropriating the new images of the “whole earth” seen from space that began to circulate in the late 1960s. The cosmological relation between earth and moon was envisioned in the form of an electronic diagram; the two bodies are sliced and rejoined with circuitry serving as literal and metaphorical seam (Plate 43). The flow diagram was flanked by the montaged faces of an elderly man and an infant. Like allegorical figures for dusk and dawn, recast in a science fiction vein reminiscent of the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), they condensed the group’s assertion that the egalitarian access to information would enable “an expanded democracy in which education is a process consistent with life itself.”114 The prospect of such a global information network as a new beginning was central to the group’s best-­known film, realized the following year. The first of the Fundamental Acts cycle to be realized, Supersurface: An Alternate Model of Life on Earth was conceived for the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz in 1972. The project narrated the emergence of a hypersophisticated technologi­cal surface capable of providing, air, water, heat, video and audio communication, nutrition, light, and even memory. The film played on a looping viewer installed in one of the “micro-­environments” that Ambasz commissioned as a counterpoint to the exhibition’s larger survey of postwar Italian design. Ambasz engaged Superstudio, as well as Archizoom, Gruppo 9999, La Pietra, and Gruppo Strumm under the rubric of what he called “counter­design,” a position that rejected the idea of design as a problem-­solving activity in order to emphasize 275 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.15.

Superstudio, drawings for Fundamental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death), Life: Super­ surface installation at The Museum of Modern Art, 1972. Printed paper and felt-­tip pen on paper. Copyright Superstudio. Digital image copy­right CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

“the need for a renewal of philosophical discourse and for social and political involvement as a way of bringing about structural changes in our society.”115 It was as part of the search for a discursive, rather than instrumental, conception of design that the turn to the counterscenario should be understood. Visitors to the micro-­environment entered a darkened room lined in black felt within the larger, equally blacked-­out exhibition gallery. Inside was a softly glowing mirrored cube and the film playing on a continuous loop 276 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

(Plate 44). Within the cube lay a sheet of laminated gridded plastic. On its surface were devices of uncertain purpose connected to a metallic plug in the corner, surrounded by traces of vegetation. The museum’s press release offered the following description of the encounter: The public, which may walk around this cube, sees through the one-­ way mirror a space infinitely reflected. The space, symbolizing a benign 277 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

environment void of any constructions presents, when one looks up, a continuing passage of clouds. Looking down, one sees the earth transformed into a continuous infrastructure of energy systems. Connected to that floor infrastructure emerge a number of tubes purporting to be life-­supporting elements: air, heat, water, food, communications.116

The group described the emergence of such a hypersophisticated infrastructural surface as a kind of model, “a model of a mental attitude . . . not a three-­ dimensional model of a reality that can be given concrete form by a mere transposition of scale, but a visual rendition of a critical attitude toward (or a hope for) the activity of design, understood as philosophical speculation, as a means to knowledge, as critical existence.”117 Such a “mental model” proposed an alternative scenario for the histogram grid, the “single design,” and the process of general reduction of work that Superstudio had articulated since 1969, one that hinged on a shift from monument to surface. The physical continuity of the continuous monument project was flattened into a connected yet not actually contiguous technologi­ cal surface. The stress on surface and information challenged the dominance of categories such as form, structure, or space. Yet Supersurface neither celebrated ersatz superficiality nor attempted to recuperate an authentic surface against the degraded effects of consumer culture. Rather, it formulated an extreme concept of surface in order to speculate about a condition in which architecture was radically detached from problems of structure and shelter. At stake was a different type of continuity, no longer unbroken extension but the invisible connectivity of an energy and communications infrastructure. The effort to model such continuity returned to the group’s interest in advancing a critique of the iconography of technology; indeed, it described the project not strictly as a film but as an interdisciplinary image guide.118 The bulk of Supersurface was a montage composed from nearly one hundred still shots, culled from sources that included illustrated weeklies such as Life magazine and Epoca, journals of architecture and science, and posters and calendars—­all of which were photographed using an animation stand and combined into sequences with the addition of voice-­over and minimalist electronic music.119 The film was composed of several rapidly paced sequences—­each lasting between two and three minutes—­and its formal structure hinged on a series of conflicts articulated via the sophisticated tracking, zooming, and crosscutting techniques characteristic of commercial productions. The film opens by zooming into a cross section of human sense organs; close-­ups of fingers, eyes, ears, and the brain are followed by 278 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

images of scientific testing equipment, computerized circuits, and satellites (Plate 45). In positing this hypothetical, technologically sophisticated surface, the film refers to an even broader range of surfaces, from the crust of the earth and the surface of a lake to human skin, capsules, architectural envelopes, crash helmets, and electrodes. The montage shifts from the scale of tissue and the technologies operating there to interplanetary travel, a collision of images that plays virtual expansion against physical restriction in a manner reminiscent of Hollein’s “Everything Is Architecture.” The subject, in these initial moments, was never simply extended, however. He or she appears torn between what the voice-­over called “a new symbiosis of tools as an extension of the senses” and “complex mechanisms [that] fragment behavioral models into rigid patterns.”120 The conflict between expansion, on the one hand, and fragmentation and constraint, on the other, was the first in a series of contradictions that run through the film. Just as the cuts in the Continuous Monument storyboard orchestrated sudden temporal jumps, the images of electrodes and machines from the first sequence shift abruptly to images of torch-­wielding cavemen. From there the viewer was confronted with a rapid-­fire series of images, from a view of the Egyptian court in the relocated Crystal Palace to the plastic skin of Banham and Francois Dallegret’s power membrane house, the nets of Frei Otto’s lightweight roof systems, and a queue of visitors waiting to enter Fuller’s United States pavilion at Expo 67. The subject has shifted from a concern with the body, the senses, and their mediated extension to the surface of lightweight environmental envelopes. The evolution of surfaces capable of ever more efficient environmental control was not narrated in terms of technological progress but as a dynamic in which design produced “a complexity of new needs and a new kind of poverty.”121 From the stationary bodies in queues at world’s fairs, the sequence turns to focus on movement without any fixed relation to place, from masses at the Isle of Wight festival to a pioneer wagon, a family on camelback, and a shot of the Hajj pilgrimage beneath a blinding desert sun. Unfixed nomadic existence stands against any type of enclosure as the shot slowly fades to white. The next sequence opens with a close-­up of a lens flare. The camera pulls back, revealing a photomontage of a grassy field traversed by two gridded planes emanating from the now-­distant flare, above which a spacecraft hovers improbably. The appearance of a grid hovering between the earth and outer space initiates an extended sequence in which the figure of the nomad gives way to a range of grids. The movement from images of farmers’ fields, suburban plans, and Manhattan to an interconnected map of European 279 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

capitals narrates a shift from agrarian villages to cities, and from cities to the formation of a transnational network of information and energy. In the film’s animated depiction of the Supersurface, this network first appears as a linear, orthogonal grid that slowly disappears, leaving only a point grid. The points then appear as micro surfaces, distant blinking lights that the voice-­over describes as the connection nodes of a new nomadic existence. The tension between literal and figural aspects of the surface is caught up with the film’s larger theme of dematerialization, evoked across a variety of grid images, from computer circuits to lightweight architectural envelopes to urban patterns, culminating in a series of photomontages that have come to stand for the project. The point grid appears here not as an imposition on the landscape but as that which remains once all else has been removed, a “visual-­ verbal metaphor for an ordered and rational distribution of resources,” once cities, houses, and objects have disappeared.122 In the Supersurface photomontages the effort to envision a rational, egali­ tarian network defined by connections between points appears in the guise of something residual. Elimination was to serve as the chance for a new beginning. The polemical force of such montages hinged on the way they articulated the relationship of inside to outside. Superstudio’s Supersurface recalled and amplified the plug-­in logic put forward in any number of projects by Archigram. Yet with Superstudio, the plug-­in is no longer the infrastructure for a flexible intermedia interior defined by video feedback—­as it had been in something like Archigram’s Features Monte Carlo project. Not unlike Toraldo di Francia’s photographs for Superstudio’s Misura furniture, the Supersurface photomontages continually displace the element of an interior into external landscapes. Such exteriori­zation of the interior produced a scenario for narrating a life disencumbered of objects, yet in such images the exterior could equally appear interiorized, domesticated by a largely invisible technological network. In the photomontages, this ambiguous reversibility was achieved by inverting the grid’s relationship to the photomechanical ground. Whereas the Continu­ous Monu­ment meticulously adapted gridded volumes to the space of appropriated photographs, Supersurface started with a surface gridded according to the conventions of one-­point perspective, onto and around which cutout photographic fragments were placed.123 Assembly was envisioned not by additive combination but as a residual tableau, the remainders of a process that cut out and eliminated the existing environment or architectural surrounding. Suitably decontextualized by the grid surface, the figures placed on it could be seen in terms of a hypothetical future consistent with the voice-­over’s narration. Yet it was precisely the conspicuous legibility of 280 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

these figures—­blatantly extracted from the illustrated commercial magazines of their day—­that undermined such futurity, allowing these fictional scenes to appear as extravagant exaggerations of the present. Like the film’s visual form, Supersurface’s voice-­over was also a montage of sources, in which ultra-­left criticisms of the consumer society collided with a techno-­mysticism associated with the rhetoric of expanded cinema. The film’s final sequence—­in which two actors playing hippies engage in a telepathic virtual embrace in a bucolic landscape—­was reminiscent of Gene Youngblood’s theorization of intermedia networks in his influential book Expanded Cinema.124 Drawing on a mixture of McLuhan, Fuller, and the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Youngblood posited that a planetary intermedia network would create a collective mental environment, which he called, following Teilhard, the noosphere. “A film of organized intelligence,” he wrote, “encircles the planet. . . . The minds of three-­and-­a-­half billion humans—­twenty-­five percent of all humans who ever lived—­currently nourish the noosphere; distributed around the globe by the intermedia network, it becomes a new ‘technology’ that may prove to be one of the most powerful tools in man’s history.”125 The noosphere existed somewhere between a “tool”

FIGURE 5.16.

Prototypes for Misura furniture, 1970. Photo­ graph by Toraldo di Francia. Copyright Toraldo di Francia.

281 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

FIGURE 5.17.

Superstudio, Funda­ mental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death), Life: The Encampment, 1971. Included in Supersurface: An Alternate Model of Life on Earth, 1972. Ink, airbrush ink, and printed paper on board, 33.6 × 52 cm. Copyright Superstudio. Digital image copy­ right CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

and a “film,” a communication medium and a membrane-­like barrier. Its potential appeared caught between the era’s seemingly boundless “technologi­ cal zeal” and overloaded individuals who struggled to “cope with the influx of information,” resulting in a situation where humanity risked being stuck, “adrift upon the surface of radical evolution, unable to plumb the depths of its swift and turbulent current.”126 It is once again a question of image flow, in which forms of cutting associated with montage were redescribed in terms that emphasized fluidity. For Youngblood, it was precisely the fluid qualities of “expanded cinema”—­the interpenetration of different image forms that were simultaneous and synesthetic—­that could allow a collective delving of the depths of an emerging global intermedia environment.127 It is tempting to see the nomadic figures on the Supersurface as vignettes of Youngblood’s society “adrift on the surface of radical evolution.”128 Yet the short film articulated a different relation of surface to depth, and inside to outside, than that described by Youngblood. Just as the spatiality of the Supersurface differed from Youngblood’s noosphere, so too did the film’s montage,

282 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

which avoided fluid synesthetic overlay and immersion in order to construct a scenario, a narrative about such emerging global networks. A film made almost entirely from ready-­made stills, Supersurface had plenty of precedents, from the films of Charles and Ray Eames to Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), to the experimental films of Tinto Brass projected on the interior of the mirrored Kaleidoscope at the XIII Milan Triennale in 1964.129 Yet the register the group aimed for was neither that of experimental film nor that of a world’s fair display but something akin to a television spot.130 An important model was the Italian program Carosello, which began appearing on RAI in 1958 and remained the only permitted form of advertisement on Italian public television through the 1960s.131 Carosello was not only a program but a format; advertisers were required to produce brief films of “educational or artistic merit,” which were then followed by a brief sponsorship message.132 While intended to restrict and control the influence of American-­style advertising, as Paul Ginsborg notes, Carosello quickly became the most popular program on Italian television—­especially for children—­and thus concentrated the effects of consumerism for a younger generation.133 The social contradictions embedded in a genre like Carosello fit the group’s effort to use this commercial device against itself, a ready parallel for Superstudio’s own contradictory situation—­presenting a scenario about a life free of objects within an exhibition largely devoted to the most sophisticated domestic goods produced by the Italian design industry.134

The Destruction of the Object and the Assembly of the Scenario More than any of the other contributions to The New Domestic Landscape, Supersurface can be seen as a comment on the economy of surfaces that crucially supported the exhibition.135 The New Domestic Landscape was a virtuoso display of objects cast, formed, and extruded in a vast range of shapes, finishes, and colors, an exhibition of plastics at their most technically and volumetrically inventive. Supersurface, by contrast, looked to plastic not as form but as film—­a thin, flexible, almost insubstantial material surface, yet one that was as essential to photomechanical media as it was to decorative laminate surfaces. The latter were a product brought to market in the early 1960s, with the promise of becoming a surfacing material for a virtually unlimited number of objects and interiors. Yet laminates also remained culturally unstable, a synthetic, chemical material that could easily be synonymous with inauthenticity, cheapness, and kitsch.136 Superstudio’s screen-­printed laminate was produced in collaboration with Print, a brand of the Italian firm 283 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

Abet Laminati with whom the group realized a number of projects during the 1970s. The grid of the histograms, and the associated reflection on design that surrounded it, engaged the unstable connotations of such a material technology at a moment when architects and designers were called on to endow printed laminates with new cultural capital. Ettore Sottsass Jr. had influentially used laminates in his series of Superboxes in 1966, objects that blurred the boundary between furniture and bright, polychromatic pop sculptures.137 Superstudio embraced the superficial qualities of laminates and exacerbated them in a particular manner; turning away from colorful pop patterns, they sought the “neutralizing” potentials of a black-­and-­white gridded surface. Just as the standardized grid of the histograms was to automate design decisions, their generic blankness was to interrupt the “discourse” of domestic objects and interiors.138 If the histograms were deliberately generic, the grid pattern was not ready-­ made. Superstudio designed the 3 by 3 centimeter pattern using a drafting machine borrowed from the cartographic institute of the University of Florence.139 This overlooked fact highlights another layer of complexity to Superstudio’s grid, which was materialized by and circulated through appropriated technologies and techniques, from cartography to plastics production, commercial photography, film production, model making, and offset lithographic printing. Superstudio’s laminates and the Misura series of furniture, as well as its prints, photomontages, and films, can be seen as a media assemblage that played on two different functions of the grid. As Bernhard Siegert has argued, as a cultural technology the grid could serve as an imaging system for transferring three-­dimensional data onto portable two-­dimensional surfaces and as a system for enabling the symbolic manipulation of what has been made into data.140 The histograms arguably collapsed the first function into the second. A pattern generated by a cartographic transfer technology yielded a printed laminate surface for manipulating the appearance of mass-­produced three-­dimensional objects. Such a surface could no longer be understood as superficial and external, something applied to a more substantial support; rather, it was the generative graphic matrix for a series of objects derived from a set of permutations. The project called up the charged memory of earlier twentieth-­century efforts to mobilize the grid as the basis for projects of total standardization or proportional control—­from Ernst Neufert’s Bauordnungs­ lehre (1936) to Le Corbusier’s Modulor (1951)—­at the very moment when late-modern discourses advocating design methodologies derived from systems theory were taking on weight within architectural culture.141 In the group’s photomontages and furniture, the capacity for totalization latent in 284 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

the cultural technology of the grid was both recalled and deflated, cast simultaneously in guise of infrastructure and of decor. Superstudio’s hybrid surface-­matrix aimed to work with surface as information, rather than see surface as a barrier to be transcended in search of a higher state of awareness. Superstudio responded to the claims of efficiency advanced by design methods discourses, yet its counterscenarios mobilized surface as a way to address the aesthetic and semiotic systematization of the architectural object. In the article “Destruction, Metamorphosis, and Reconstruction of Objects,” first published in the magazine IN, and partially excerpted for the catalog of Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, the group wrote: The system on which to act by means of design is architectural culture, understood as a communicable field of values, and as a means (tool) for social transformations. This “system” is the only “object” that interests us. An object, therefore, that coincides neither with the product nor with its “parts”: an object-­structure, a mechanism of multiple-­reactions, a tangible object, homogeneous and isotropic, consistent with the social system that produces and sustains it.142

In a manner not unrelated to Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, examined in the previous chapter, the key question hinged on the more intimate pene­tration of systematically coordinated semiotic differences into the object. In contrast to the image-­objects that had marked the beginning of the group’s career, system-­objects such as the histograms could no longer be conceived in terms of individual consumer products or as a mechanism composed of discrete parts. For these very reasons, it demanded a different conception of assembly. Destruction, for Superstudio, was not the elimination of a physical thing but the “destruction of the syntactic links binding objects to the system, the destruction of meanings superimposed by power.”143 In such a scenario destruction was neither absolute nor purely negative, but a prelude to metamorphosis. The aim was to radically alter how architectural objects were perceived, affirming the architect’s capacity to act on the discipline. Seen from this perspective, Superstudio’s images of exteriority might be read less as efforts to escape from the discipline than as figures of recursive thinking in a moment of crisis. Appropriating and reassembling the materials of popular culture, they turn back onto the visual and intellectual discourse of the architectural discipline, not as an autonomous domain of conception but as an instrument for acting on a wider socio-­technical system. The counterscenarios that Superstudio elaborated return to and rework 285 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

the etymological root of the term scenario. The familiar definition of scenario as “the outline or synopsis of the plot or scenes of a film” belongs to the twentieth century. The term’s initial sixteenth-­century meaning referred to the techniques for constructing the architecture of theatrical scenes, the setting of a narrative and its protagonists into a view, or a perspective.144 It is precisely in this sense that Superstudio remobilized perspectival techniques. In doing so, they deployed photomontage to construct a mise-­en-­scène, and used sequential montage to alter and rearticulate the legibility and meaning of particular elements. Constructing an illusory perspectival depth in which to set a discourse served to radically condense a scenario and to set it in motion, a means for affecting, subverting, and altering established narratives within architectural culture. Such a tactic was developed precisely as a way to address the power of journals such as Casabella and Domus, and for contending with sophisticated multimedia exhibitions such at Trigon 69 and Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Yet, architectural images, they argued, played a crucial role beyond the debates of the discipline as well, since they participated in a broader process of assuefazione (habituation, or acclimatization) through which the public adapted itself to the rapid social transformations of the 1960s. Such a process, they speculated, was itself a site of potential intervention. If the process of habituation [assuefazione] to current society is replaced by a series of aberrant images, capable of postulating another scale of values and behaviors, the system will see its public image placed in doubt; the induced collective desires come to be replaced with other desires, equally attractive but more just and true. To satisfy these new desires the system will be placed in crisis.145

The Supersurface montages were just such an aberrant sequence of images. Closely tied to modes of exaggeration and exacerbation, aberration laid hold of familiar, even banal elements, and pushed them beyond their expected use. Cinematic montage was crucial for producing such aberrant repetitions. Inserting the figure of the grid into a changeable sequence of filmic scenes, Superstudio altered the legibility and meaning of this element. One of the group’s most potent aberrations concerned the image of the gridded mirror glass that recurs in Supersurface. Pioneered in Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1962, mirror glass was a material that had become increasingly prevalent in architectural culture and was, by the 1970s, closely identified with the spread of information technology buildings such as Norman Foster’s IBM Pilot Head Office in Cosham (1970–­71) and Langdon 286 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

and Wilson’s CNA Park Place in Los Angeles (1971) (Plate 46). Mirror glass, as Reinhold Martin has argued, dramatically transformed both the function and the physiognomy of the postwar curtain wall.146 Such calmly modulated, self-­effacing enclosures seemed able to both repel the gaze and assimilate themselves into almost any surrounding. For this very reason, they suggested a system as relentless as it was sophisticated, capable of domesticating and controlling any environment whatsoever, akin to the group’s description of the “maximum extension and efficiency of imperialist processes” essential to the postwar “society of superproduction and superconsumption.”147 The reflections that turned the external gaze back toward the surrounding environment were intimately connected not only with the optical but with the environmental function of these surfaces, which used deflection to mitigate and manage the heat gain associated with extensive glazing. Superstudio was not the only one to see in such surfaces the makings of a historical transformation. The mirrored exterior of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel (1977) in Los Angeles was famously the central example of the postmodern condition advanced in Fredric Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The “distorting and fragmenting reflections of one enormous glass surface to the other,” he argued, “can be taken as paradigmatic of the central role and process of reproduction in postmodernist culture.”148 Jameson’s insight would seem to hold true for Supersurface as well. Yet, while Supersurface might appear to offer a “glimpse of the technological sublime” and conform to the suppression of depth that Jameson argued was central to late capitalist culture, something else arguably appears in the film’s final montage. In these scenes, the mirrored grid does not reflect itself; rather, it makes visible an atmospheric condition. Submitted to a physical and conceptual reorientation, the Supersurface has slipped from the vertical to the horizontal, from the plane of vision to the plane of an imagined commons supporting a theoretically endless potential for movement. The shift from vertical to horizontal, and from enclosure to support served as the scene for a recapitulation and condensation of conflicts within the film’s narration. At one extreme, the film promised an idealized scenario of communication, in which different minds were made fully intelligible to each other, a discourse that mirrored Youngblood’s and McLuhan’s optimistic visions of the emerging global communications network. At the other, it appeared as a vast stage for images of constraint and isolation.149 Images of a hippie family’s camp—­extracted from a photo of the Wheeler Ranch commune in Northern California—­confronted the sedentary isolation of a “Mrs. Jones” stranded amid the trappings of suburban well-­being.150 The image of a group of carefree “capelloni”—­as Italian 287 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

hippies were dubbed—­reclining amid vegetables and bottles of wine was followed by a more disquieting sense of exposure and desolation in the image of a young girl sweeping up detritus (Plate 47). Extracted from mass cultural magazines and defamiliarized by the imaginary, reflective grid of the Supersurface, the sequence of images articu­lated conflicts between mobility and fixity, connection and isolation, abundance and poverty, leisure and domestic labor.151 The displaced glimpses of sky that appear on such a surface were but one instance of the film’s dominant recurring motif: light. These ranged from the flickering of testing equipment, the auratic glow emanating from bodies, and lens flares that cast off scotomizing flashes of brightness. Throughout the film, the wish to “reduce operations,” to “eliminate formal structures,” or to envision a “life free of work” was punctuated by unstable, ephemeral movements of light. Such flashes were tied to a different vision of architecture’s relationship to information, one that could not be captured in the form of a microcosmic model or in the idealized mental community of an electronic “noosphere.” Rather, the continually shifting domain of information and data is expressed both as optical flashes which exceed the image and as an imagi­ nary surface whose extension was unprecedented. As extensive and central as it was elusive and fleeting, information shifted from the printed surface of the laminate to the polarized mirror, and from the grain of the mass media image to the plane of the projection screen—­everyday surfaces that appear as the exterior of a larger unseen assemblage whose stability was suffused with illusion. In such scenes, the Supersurface appeared both as a physical barrier and a reflection of an elusive atmospheric medium, an immersive perceptual condition and a supply of air, energy, and electronic telecommunications that blurred into nature. It is fitting that the Supersurface was a series of images of and about the handling of particles; the reflections on the grid surfaces in the photomontages were made by transferring drawings to diazotype paper and overlaying these with delicate washes of airbrushed ink. Such environmental reflections were envisioned by the medium of pressurized air, in which droplets of ink and photomechanical fragments were rendered commensurable. Such a medium emblematized a form of human-­technoid touch, a paradoxical type of marking that enabled the hand to eliminate the traces of its own intervention. In this counterscenario, surface appears as the reflection of an unstable distance defined by shifting glimpses of cloud and sky: visible yet inaccessible. If the totalizing power of the grid as a cultural technology stems from its capacity to assign a place to everything, the uncertain depth of atmosphere suggested by the Supersurface rendered this figure 288 SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS

undecidable. The atmosphere that suffused the grid might suggest a domain discontinuous from the relentlessness of the grid’s logic, yet it could also suggest the degree to which the grid’s structuring power had penetrated the very amorphous atmospheric surrounding that seemed independent from it.152 It was via the metaphor of the mirror that Superstudio suggested the ambigu­ ous reconstruction that might emerge from the destruction of the object’s syntactic links to meaning. Such a surface was evoked both as ­superficie—­a tabula rasa, a plane stripped of history and meaning—­and through the verb affiorare, a process whereby something emerges, appears, surfaces. The neo-­ Romantic wish for a return to primary, unalienated human needs appears as an estranged reflection, a scenario voiced in the future conditional: “When design as an inducement to consume ceases to exist, an empty area is created, in which slowly, as on the surface of a mirror, such things as the need to act, mold, transform, give, conserve, modify, come to light.”153

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PLATE 1. Antoine Pompe (with Fernand Bodson), Projet de Maison du Peuple, Société Cooperative La Populaire, place Foch 6, Liège, 1914. Graphite on silver gelatin print mounted on board. Collection of Archives d’Architecture Moderne, Brussels.

PLATE 2. Archigram (Peter Cook), Plug-­in City study, typical section, 1964. Print with color film.

PLATE 3. Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Housing, 1952. Competition entry, unrealized. Photograph with India ink and cut-­and-­pasted printed paper. Copyright Alison and Peter Smithson. Copyright CNAC/MNAM/Dist.–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 4. Le Corbusier, Habiter, 1937. Photomural at the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, Exposition Internationale, Paris. Reconstruction for the exhibition Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography (La Chaux-­de-­Fonds, 2012), by Arthur Rüegg, Zurich (with Peter Habe).

PLATE 6. Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that

makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956. Collage, 10¼ × 9¾ inches. Private collection. Copyright R. Hamilton, DACS, and ARS 2017.

PLATE 5. John McHale, cover of The Architectural Review,

May 1957. “Machine Made America,” special issue.

PLATE 7. John McHale, consecutive pages from Shoe-­Life Stories, circa 1954. Collage book. Yale Center for British Art,

Gift of Magda Cordell McHale.

PLATE 8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, concert hall, 1941–42. Graphite, cut-­and-­pasted photo­ mechanical reproduction, cut-­and-­pasted papers, cut-­and-­pasted painted paper, and gouache on gelatin silver photograph mounted on board, 29½ × 62 inches. The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mary Callery. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst Bonn. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 9. Theo Crosby, cover of Architectural Design, August 1956. Collection of Avery Library.

PLATE 10. Photograph of Light/Sound Workshop projections at Miss Misty and the Tri-­Cool Data, Aston University, Birmingham, 1965. Copyright and courtesy of Tony Rickaby.

PLATE 11. Photograph of Experimental projection and equipment, Light/Sound Workshop, Hornsey College of Art, London, 1965–­68.

PLATE 12. Photograph

of the arena at Light/ Sound Workshop, K4—­Kinetic Audio Visual Environments, West Pier, Brighton, 1967. Copyright and courtesy of Tony Rickaby.

PLATE 13. Peter Cook, A Series of Paradoxes, drawing for Control and Choice project, 1966–­67. Print from original ink-­line drawing with added color film and cut-­and-­pasted photograph. Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 14. Peter Cook, Ideas Circus, 1968. Cut-­and-­pasted paper, color film, and transfer letter

on printed paper. Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 15. Peter Cook, Ideas Circus, 1968. Plan of air-inflated dome configured for multiple projections.

Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 16. Peter Cook, Instant City airship in Lancashire, 1970. Cut-­and-­pasted

printed paper on photograph of scale model. Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 17. Oscar Nitzchke (1901–­91), Maison de la Publicité project, Paris, France, 1934–­36. Elevation. Ink, color pencil, gouache, and graphite on lithograph on spiral-­notebook card stock, 28 × 20½ inches (71.1 × 52.1 cm). Gift of Lily Auchincloss, Barbara Jakobson, and Walter Randel. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modem Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 18. Dennis Crompton, Peter Cook, and Ron Herron, Features Monte Carlo

project, 1971. Explanatory section through dome. Ink with transfer letter and photographic ­elements. Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 20. Ron Herron, Instant City, Urban Action Tune Up, 1968. Cut-­and-­pasted

printed paper, transfer letter, color film, and ink on board. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

PLATE 19. Dennis Crompton, Peter Cook, and Ron Herron, Features Monte Carlo, 1969. Competition stage layouts for a circus event and exhibition event. Ink, color film, and transfer lettering on trace. Copyright Archigram.

PLATE 21. Hans Hollein, untitled 35 mm slide (clay models on roof of Berkeley apartment), circa 1959. Archive Hans Hollein, AzW and MAK, Vienna.

PLATE 22. Hans Hollein, Superstructure over Vienna, 1960. Collection of Centre Pompidou. Copyright Hans Hollein and CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN–­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. PLATE 23. Claes Oldenburg, Lipsticks in Piccadilly

Circus, London, 1966. Cut-­and-­pasted paper on postcard. Copyright Claes Oldenburg. Photograph copyright Tate, London 2017.

PLATE 24. Hans Hollein,

Christa Metek Boutique, Vienna, 1967. Photograph by Franz Hubmann. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

PLATE 25. Hans Hollein, “Look at the world

through Austrian Glasses,” 1968. Page layout with Mylar overlay, Austriennale catalog. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

PLATE 26. Otl Aicher, official poster for the Games of the XXth

Olympiad, Munich, 1972. Copyright Otl Aicher. Courtesy Stadt Ulm, Ulmer Museum.

PLATE 27. Hans Hollein, system diagram for Media Lines,

Olympic Village, Munich, 1972. Copyright Private archive Hollein.

PLATE 28. Hans Hollein, Media Lines, Olympic Village, Munich, 1972. Photograph by Armin Linke. Copyright 2014 Armin Linke.

PLATE 29. Hubert Tonka, Gare Saint-­Lazare. Photomontage reproduced in Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (1967).

Copyright Utopie.

PLATE 30. Yona Friedman, project for a spatial city above the existing city, 1959. Felt pen, corrector fluid, and tracing paper

on photographic print. Collection de la Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Digital image copyright Roger-­Viollet / The Image Works.

PLATE 31. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967. Frame enlargement.

PLATE 32. Jean-­Paul

Jungmann, initial geometric studies for Dyodon, “Poumon Notebook Sketch,” 1967. Collection MNAM / CCI Centre Georges Pompidou. Copyright Jean-­Paul Jungmann.

PLATE 33. Poster for

Structures Gonflables. Exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, March 1968.

PLATE 34. Utopie, pasteup for “Architecture comme

problème théorique,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, September 1968. Copyright Utopie.

PLATE 35. “Les Halles: General DeGaulle studied twelve confidential projects. Here they are.” Page layout from Paris-­Match, no. 951 (July 1967). Copyright Paris-­Match.

PLATE 36. Pietro De Rossi, Giorgio Ceretti, and Riccardo Rosso, architects, L’Altro Mundo

Club, Rimini, 1967. Plan. Copyright Pietro De Rossi.

PLATE 37. Pietro De Rossi, Giorgio Ceretti, and Riccardo Rosso, architects, L’Altro Mundo Club, interior view. Photographer unknown. Copyright Pietro De Rossi.

PLATE 38. Superstudio, Continuous Monument, St. Moritz, 1969. Cut-­and-­pasted paper with colored pencil on printed paper.

Copyright Superstudio Archive.

PLATE 39. Stefano Graziani, Cassettiera with

painting by Adolfo Natalini, Superstudio office, circa 1967. Florence, 2012. Copyright Stefano Graziani.

PLATE 40. Superstudio, Continuous Monument (New New York), 1969. Storyboard, Casabella, no. 358, 1971. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

PLATE 41. Superstudio, Continuous Monument (New New York), 1969. Photomontage. Collection of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

PLATE 42. Gruppo 9999 and Superstudio, Mondial Festival at Space Electronic, Florence, November 1971. Copyright Gruppo 9999.

PLATE 43. Superstudio, The Fundamental Acts—­Education. Offset lithographic print, Plura Editions, 1971. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

PLATE 44. Superstudio, Microevent/Microenvironment. Installation at Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972. Photograph and copyright Cristiano Toraldo di Francia.

PLATE 45. Superstudio, frame enlargements from Supersurface: An Alternate Model of Life on Earth, 1972. 16 mm film.

Copyright Superstudio Archive.

PLATE 46. Langdon and Wilson, CNA Park Place, Los Angeles, 1971. Photograph by Wayne Thom. Copyright USC Libraries Special Collections.

PLATE 47. Superstudio, Fundamental Acts: Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death: Spring Cleaning, 1972. Ink, airbrush ink, and printed paper on board. Copyright Superstudio Archive.

EPILOGUE Image as Assemblage

If the environment of the future is to be created according to the principles governing perception rather than those of construction . . . then the design of that environment, with its accompanying software, is going to become the de facto province of systems and media men, electronics and computer experts, film directors and editors, photographers and shopfitters. Architects who cannot manipulate sound and projection systems and their associated optics and electronics will be about as much use as demonologists in a cancer research hospital. —­Martin Pawley, “The Image Considered as a Structural System”

It has been almost fifty years since a young architecture critic named Martin Pawley typed these lines. They were written on the heels of an extended visit to the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, in the summer of 1970, where the critic found himself simultaneously awed and unsettled by the technical sophistication and scale of the multiscreen montage environments into which he was serially immersed. More than structure, program, or aesthetics, the future of the discipline hinged on the intellectual and practical skills that would enable the manipulation of an expanding range of optical media and their accompanying software. By manipulation, Pawley meant the know-­how that would allow for a thorough control of these new technologies, an embodied knowledge epitomized by the skill and dexterity of a well-­trained hand, the “manus” from which manipulation etymologically derives. Yet manipulation equally conjures the word’s other valence: a subtle and devious control over human perception and behavior. Simultaneously a figure for mastery and deception, of control and suspicion, the ambivalence of manipulation cannot be 291

expunged. To consider the role of optical media and their accompanying software in architectural culture invites one to think again about manipulation, both figurative and literal, precisely since the materials, processes, effects, and techniques of optical media are things that can never be fully encompassed by human hands. Photomechanical media over the last two decades have shifted from the analog technologies of filmic emulsion, printed paper, and chemi­ cal development to digital processes driven by electronic sensors, screens, and software. One result has been a pervasive awareness of the vast array of manipulations involved in the production and circulation of information in digital image form, together with a renewed interest in the long history of interventions that have accompanied photographic technologies.1 The growing ubiquity of various kinds of editing software has made the manipulation of digital media more accessible and routine, even as users are increasingly distanced from any involvement with their technical infrastructures. Yet are we still to think of the products and processes of such programs in terms of montage and collage? The recourse to montage and collage in accounts of digital media in architectural culture has been marked by inconsistency and conflict more than consensus. On the one hand, the cascade of operations through which we extract, transfer, suture, layer, scale, sample, and filter digital images—­often summarized by the anachronistic shorthand “cut-­ and-­paste”—has been held up as an extension of these cultural techniques, whose incorporation into the computer increasingly shapes and informs every aspect of contemporary architectural culture.2 Yet one also finds the opposite argument, namely, that digital methods for the production and circulation of images operate in a new language, distinct from the twentieth-­century legacies of collage and montage.3 Yet neither renewal nor rupture are sufficient to think the strange mixture of continuity and transformation that marks the persistence of montage and collage amid the so-­called digital turn. Rather than offer a prehistory of a digital turn in architectural culture, this book has sought to reread the technical, formal, and ideological assemblages that the montages and collages of the long 1960s made visible, together with some of the blind spots these entailed. The intensive engagement with graphic media found in these years did not so much eliminate a concern with the tectonic as displace it. New kinds of constructive analogies proliferated across the works considered here, enmeshed in a host of unresolved contradictions, between the demands of perception and those of mass; between theoretically endless space frames and the historical particularities of sites; between the potency of kinetic motion and the stability of more permanent forms; between the power of invisible networks of electronics and anxieties about surveillance and control. 292 EPILOGUE

Reading montage through the lens of assembly has meant shifting away from an allegorical interpretation of montage, which has associated montage procedures with fragmentation, brokenness, and incompleteness. In such accounts, montage’s capacity to deplete and remake signs mirrors both the imposition of exchange value that transforms things into commodities, and a process with the potential to redeem them.4 As powerful as such analyses have been, they have tended to overlook the ways in which the collage-­montage paradigm has served as a mechanism for other forms of visual and intellectual transference, displacement, and recontextualization. Such transfers enacted, and reflected on, the appropriation and reassembly of technologies, information, materials, and concepts from other domains. Yet transfers also produce disorientation, troubling the very frameworks that might guide the “proper” reassembly of those technologies, information, materials, and concepts set in motion. The constructive analogies advanced through montage and collage represent an opportunity to engage with an archaeology of the media through which images are generated and consumed, dynamics that have scarcely been addressed within the renewed attention to images associated with architecture’s “iconic turn.”5 The power often attributed to the preva­lence of images is only partly about their iconic qualities; another, equally important share belongs to the extensive yet less visible social and technical assemblage from which they issue and through which they circulate. Assemblage, in this sense, refers not to a genre of artwork particular to the 1960s but to a general theoretical framework for thinking about the cultural-­ technical network of actors, machines, icons, behaviors, and discourses that make up the conditions of possibility for transfer operations. By the same token, assemblage provides a framework for theorizing the intellectual-­ technical conditions of architectural visualization. Drawn from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the concept of assemblage has been theo­rized by a wide range of disciplines in recent years, from urban geography to philosophy, and from political theory to film and media studies.6 While each inflects the concept differently, they share some key aspects. Assemblages seek to understand relationships between parts defined by consistencies rather than by a transcendent or substantial identity—­whether authors, nations, symbolic forms, or mediums. A temporary set of qualities and conditions that enables heterogeneous, nonuniform, even conflicting parts to cohere, assemblages are unities, yet unlike a Hegelian conception of organic totality, the parts are not shaped by a greater whole, nor do they obey a single logic. Deleuze and Guattari favored the conjunction of distinct bodies and types of matter, the temporary symbioses between species or machines, 293 EPILOGUE

which included forms of mutual dependency as well as volatility and friction. Hence assemblages have been attractive to those interested in rethinking the relationships human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, culture and nature. Assemblages are also understood to be radically emergent, coming into existence in ways that cannot be explained by recourse to a determining episteme, artistic tradition, or semiotic structure. The bodies, technologies, images, discourses, and behaviors that come together at a given conjuncture have their own capacity to effect action, which reflect the particularity of a given assemblage. An element transferred into a new assemblage does not only change position and purpose; it undergoes a more fundamental transformation. With an assemblage, the identity of a given element resides not in its inherent properties but stems from the consistency it forms with other elements, discourses, materials, processes, and behaviors, relationships that open up or close down its potential for action. The conceptual techniques of montage and collage have long been linked to photomechanical technolo­ gies, printing presses, distribution opportunities, and political events, and their potentials and operations will differ starkly depending on changes in these components and the ways in which they are assembled. The graphic assemblies retraced in the book provide numerous instances in which transfer and recombination served to envision the profound transformations of function and identity characteristic of an emergent assemblage. A crane whose operations are connected to lightweight dwelling capsules, shifts in the relation of work to leisure, and electronic feedback programs is no longer a device for lifting but becomes a mechanism reconfiguring relationships between mobility and fixity, connection and autonomy, activity and passivity. An aircraft carrier embedded in a rural landscape at the edge of the iron curtain is no longer strictly a war machine but a compact, autarchic city with its own airport, power generation facilities, and communications apparatus. A telephone switch plugged into a circuit board, and connected to a gallery, electric lights, periscopes, radio waves, and printed paper, is no longer a switch but the coordinating pulse of an immersive multimedia environment. A mirror wired to a network of computing facilities is no longer strictly a surface of reflection but a filter through which the image of the self enters into a different relationship with the atmosphere. Such transfers and displacements enabled speculation about the shifting relationships between architecture, technology, place, and behavior, yet they were also a way to expand the discipline’s boundaries and challenge its modes of operation. By the early 1970s, the reestablishment of disciplinary limits and a search for more broadly based codes of visual legibility became more pronounced. The 294 EPILOGUE

sharply polarized debates that ensued often manifested themselves in claims about the use and validity of composite imaging practices. Pawley could not have ignored the degree to which the preoccupations that characterized experimental architecture during the 1960s—­from immersive, multiscreen, audiovisual environments to gargantuan pneumatics and space frames—­were being absorbed and repurposed at Osaka for advertising and spectacle.7 Yet for Pawley, the most important aspect of the audiovisual pavilions in 1970 was less the particular illusions they generated than the fact that they were becoming “structural systems,” technical ensembles whose capacity to define space rivaled, and in many cases exceeded, that of the enclosures containing them.8 Osaka 70 confirmed the architectural importance of these techniques while raising doubts about the status of such experimental practices. Pawley’s critique, however, was not about distraction, co-­option, or ideology. When seen alongside the scale and sophistication of the Festival Plaza (Kenzō Tange and Arata Isozaki), the Hitachi Pavilion (Kisho Kurokawa), or the Fuji Pavilion (Yukata Murata), the installations realized by a group like Archigram—­his friends and former teachers—­appeared distinctly underwhelming.9 Such a critique was less about invalidating the latter’s work than about underscoring the urgent need to catch up with the latest technological expertise, so that it might be something other than the province and preroga­tive of technical specialists and the corporate organizations for whom they worked. Rather than refuse such spectacular phantasmagorias, the discipline needed to get inside their technical operations, in order to comprehend, and thus retain some power over the techniques that made ephemeral images and atmospheres into structural systems. Like Reyner Banham, Pawley insisted that the architect learn from the “electronics and computer experts, film directors and editors, photographers and shopfitters” in the belief that the architect’s best hope of advancing the discipline stemmed from the appropriation and reassembly of unfamiliar techniques and new forms of knowledge. He elaborated such a theory of architecture most clearly in his writings on the so-­called High-­Tech movement a decade later. The most innovative aspect of the work by Norman Foster, Richard Horden, Nicholas Grimshaw, Future Systems, and others, Pawley argued, was their ability to effect “technology transfer,” to research, appropriate, and adapt materials and techniques from aerospace, audiovisual, nuclear, and shipbuilding industries.10 In contrast to scientists and engineers, whose high degree of specialization made them less able to effect such transfers between fields, the architect’s general expertise made him or her an ideal “transfer agent.” Neither a piecemeal approach to building nor a strictly pragmatic 295 EPILOGUE

and instrumental selection of tools and materials, Pawley used the concept of technology transfer to theorize a form of architectural mastery manifested not in the artful design of new parts for mass production but through the clever appropriation and adaptation of a vast array of poorly understood and organized technologies. The mighty ocean of product information that can only presently be transferred as a result of fragmented, disorganized, peripheral awareness, could be operationalized into a state of accessibility with the simplicity and directness of a video game. . . . [architects] could concentrate on design by assembly, identifying the availability of new materials and techniques, and if necessary “specifying them into culture” with a squeeze on the joystick button.11

The sophisticated array of audiovisual techniques behind the spatial montages at Osaka were untapped technological potentials that architects were uniquely positioned to reassemble in different and possibly revolutionary new ways. As I have shown, the discourse of technology transfer on which Pawley drew was itself a product of the 1960s, bound up with efforts to accelerate dissemination of the research and design programs associated with NASA.12 Pawley, like Banham, believed that for architecture to concentrate more fully on the assembly of resources within the vast recombinatory pool of advanced technological systems, it needed to detach itself radically from the formal and aesthetic self-­consciousness of the discipline.13 Transformation in architectural culture emerged not from a desire for new kinds of form but from a different capacity and ethos of assembly made possible by a vastly expanded array of what he called “multi-­sourced element combinations.”14 The early 1970s also saw a sharp backlash against the arguments that cultural transformation would flow from a different manner of thinking and practicing technological assembly. One of the sharpest critics was Colin Rowe, whose arguments in Collage City (written with Fred Koetter) began circulating in the early 1970s, before being published in 1975 as an article and in 1978 as a book. Deeply skeptical about the discipline’s infatuation with new technologies and scientific expertise, Rowe looked to temper what he saw as a naive and destructive faith in technological progress, a modernist mythology of “virile action,” which cast “the architect as athlete in a race with time and technology.”15 In contrast to Pawley’s montage of “multi-­sourced element combinations,” Rowe espoused collage as a mode of design at once politically pluralist and temporally anachronistic, highlighting the tensions 296 EPILOGUE

between different kinds of thinking and urban conditions, while recalling an eclectic array of exempla from a past in ways that confounded any progressive or linear sense of history. The stark polarization between concepts of montage, with its connection to technological assembly, and collage, with its affinities to composition and contextualism, reflected the disciplinary action to which the excesses of composite images were subjected in the wake of the 1960s. Rowe did not simply appeal to collage as a historical medium and tradition but sought to reconfigure collage to serve as a methodology and discourse. Much like the contemporaneous work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown—­who also made collage central to design teaching in the 1970s—­Rowe espoused a rhetoric of “both-­and” as superior to the “either-­or” alternatives favored by the architects of the modern movement.16 The prominence of collage within architectural discourse during the 1970s did not extend the graphic assemblages produced by so many experimental groups of the previous decade; more often it sought to renounce these. Rowe and Koetter, like Venturi and Scott Brown, embraced collage for its pluralism while vehemently working to discredit groups such as Archigram and Superstudio. Rowe dismissed Archigram’s designs as “townscape in a space suit,” deflating the group’s preoccupation with technology by insinuating that it was a thin dressing laid over principles lifted from postwar picturesque planning methods advocated twenty-­five years earlier by the edi­ tors of the Architectural Review. More pointedly, he argued that the group’s graphic proposals were as irresponsibly acontextual as the late modernism they supposedly opposed, both of them operating in “an ideal void which, for all intents and purposes, is the same void as that in which the urban model of c.1930 is located.”17 In a similar vein, Venturi and Scott Brown criticized the group’s megastructures as nothing but “Jules Verne versions of the Industrial Revolution with an appliqué of Pop-­aerospace terminology.”18 It is not that Venturi and Scott Brown were opposed to appliqué or to the use of complex, composite fields of photographs and other “found” media. What they sought were ways to confine and redirect their latent instabilities and excesses. The Yale School of Architecture studio that led to the publication of Learning from Las Vegas began by asking students about which graphic techniques were adequate for gaining a grasp on such an unruly and widely disparaged urban-­commercial complex like Las Vegas. The answer was collage. If the eighteenth-­century architect discovered his design gestalt by means of the Grand Tour and his sketch pad, we as twentieth-­ century architects will have to find our own “sketch pad” for Las 297 EPILOGUE

Vegas. We feel we should construct our visual image of Las Vegas from a collage made from Las Vegas artifacts of many types and sizes, from YESCO signs to the Caesars Palace daily calendar.19

The collaging and collecting of materials from such commercial environments was to replace the sketching of ruins, and in this new pedagogical assemblage collage assumed a new function: visual and semantic analysis. In introducing the collage method, they cautioned students to “bear in mind that, however diverse the pieces, they must be juxtaposed in a meaningful way.”20 For collage to serve as a mechanism for ordering and sense making, it needs to remain above the environment and not reproduce or intensify the unsettling heterogeneity of its appearances. To tame visual excess and enable analysis, collage needed to make that which lacked sense legible, a method crucial to Venturi and Scott Brown’s larger effort to assert the importance of “meaning” and “iconography” for architecture and urban design. It would be a mistake, however, to conflate Rowe and Koetter and Venturi and Scott Brown based on their shared interest in collage at this moment. Rowe was skeptical of Venturi and Scott Brown’s interest in distilling meaning and lessons out of the heteronomous iconography and apparent formlessness of postwar commercial sprawl. Rowe’s collage discourse, as Mark Linder has emphasized, remained true to the “realist” reading of collage that Alfred H. Barr Jr. advanced in the 1930s, a material sensibility attuned to the concreteness of fragments and residues that aimed to complicate the strictly optical play of analytic cubism.21 Just as montage had unfolded in an analogi­ cal relationship to assembly and construction, collage operated analogically for Rowe; urban design might wrest composition from the real pieces of damaged cities just as a cubist collage wrested order from the vestiges and vagaries of matter and circumstance. The collage analogy enabled an attunement to the residues and conflicts latent in urban contexts to come together with a visual framework descended from modernist art, reconciling a series of oppositions—­between the contingencies of context and abstract techniques of planning, utopian projection and regional tradition, aesthetic freedom and ordered constraint.22 Yet in Rowe’s discourse collage was no longer primarily a material practice or even a medium. This transformation becomes most evident in his effort to align collage with Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s theory of the bricoleur. Rowe’s interpolation of the architect as bricoleur endowed collage with an anthropological dimension, a mental disposition rather than a strictly visual tradition descended from modernist painting. “[A] collage approach,” he argued, 298 EPILOGUE

in which objects (and attitudes) are conscripted or seduced from out of their context, is—­at the present day—­the only way of dealing with the ultimate problems of either or both, utopia and tradition; and the provenance of the architectural objects introduced into the social collage need not be of great consequence. . . . Whether they originate in Pergamum or Dahomey, in Detroit or Dubrovnik, whether their implications are of the twentieth or the fifteenth century, need be no great matter.23

Once again, it is a question of transfer. Rowe’s collage method aimed to conscript or seduce, appropriate or entice, concepts and objects from an expanded cultural spectrum and reassemble these into new configurations. Yet crucial differences remain from the instances of transfer seen in the previous chapters. Rowe’s collage method was advanced as the only way to reconcile the conflicts straining a polarized discipline. Moreover, the “provenance” and “implications” of the things transferred were of no great concern. For the various experimental practices encountered in this book, they were precisely what mattered. It was the tension and collision between unfamiliar techniques and concepts and disciplinary structures that produced the friction through which architectural culture might be redefined. Despite its embrace of pluralism, Collage City did not open the discipline onto other criteria but was part of an inward turn. Rowe’s anthropological collage was combined with his commitment to a diagrammatic formalism, extending, rather than renouncing, his long-­standing engagement with the work of historians such as Rudolf Wittkower and a gestalt vocabulary associated with perceptual psychology.24 In opposition to the dizzying universe of photomechanical materials deployed in the experimental montages of the 1960s, Collage City advanced a stricter metalanguage of formal relationships for analyzing the city: figure–­ ground oppositions, perceptions of texture, and relationships between grid-­ like “scaffolds” and figurative “exhibits.” Suitably disciplined, collage could be mobilized as part of a salvage operation, producing urban legibility at the very moment when cities were becoming increasingly difficult to read, as Lefebvre and others influentially argued at this moment. Both as a method for achieving some type of reconciliation within a divided discipline and as a means for extracting meanings and lessons from the noise and tumult of the urban environment, the disciplining of collage absorbed an interest in composite images while bracketing off the more destabilizing technological, political, and sociological factors that techniques of graphic assembly had emphasized within the experimental collaborations of the previous decade. 299 EPILOGUE

Such a bracketing was inscribed in two conflicting theories of architecture. Pawley articulated an enduring faith in architecture as an ingenious form of assembly capable of harnessing and redirecting technological forces, one that might enable the architect to assume a greater level of rigor and of playfulness. For Rowe, collage served as a methodology for a new kind of anachronistic and therapeutic contextualism, intimately connected to a vision of the architect as intellectual, technical, and historical bricoleur.25 Yet, for all their differences, Pawley’s “joystick-­enabled” architect and Rowe’s bricoleur are both figures defined by a certain faith in handling.26 The former’s agency derives from the expanded technological possibilities linked to the manipu­ lation of a vast array of information; the latter looked to reclaim a form of situated and improvisatorial intelligence about historical urban forms. To continue to think through the afterlives of these transferences, one might begin by asking somewhat different questions about the hands and handling involved. In both cases, handling stood for human agency, something distinct from the media to which hands were connected. By contrast, the transfers highlighted by the different kinds of graphic assembly studied here are never strictly formal or mental operations indifferent to the technical processes and disparate origins of the elements transferred. As such, they open up a possibility for thinking more fully the ways in which assembly can be understood as a hybrid human–­technical handling, one defined not by the alternative of mastery or domination but by entanglement within a technological assemblage whose possibilities and limitations, arrangements and operations, have been subject to radical historical change. The ability for acts of transfer and displacement to effect transformation represented the more optimistic moment of the practices studied here, a desire to reassemble elements within the limits of contingency such that they might lead to a very different state of affairs. Yet the consistency and modes of possible connection within an assemblage are not unlimited or determined solely by the possibilities of the human imagination. Assemblages, precisely because they mark an effective configuration between technologies, institutions, images, bodies, and ideologies, imply forces that exceed and confound human agency. This is not to say, however, that they necessarily foreclose or determine intention and action; rather, they invite a wider consideration of the various elements and linkages whose coming together impel a transformation. Given the shifting roles, preoccupations, and procedures through which photomechanical media continue to unfold in architectural culture, affording both a greater range of possibilities and an increasing opacity of operation, it is more important than ever to grasp the assemblages that work through the things we call images. 300 EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the generosity, support, and critical intelligence of many people who crucially helped it along the way. I am grateful to the architects, artists, and editors who generously gave interviews and opened their archives to me, including Jean Aubert, Isa­ belle Auricoste, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Gunter Feuerstein, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Hans Hollein, Jean-­Paul Jungmann, Vittorio Maschietto, Tony Rickaby, Antoine Stinco, Hubert Tonka, and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. I thank Lilli Hollein and Erich Pedevilla, for generously providing access to Hans Hollein’s archive, and Ines Ratz and Julian Tapprich, for their help at the Alfons Schilling archive. This book began as a dissertation in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, and I am enormously indebted to my advisers, Beatriz Colomina and Spyros Papapetros, whose unflagging support and critical intelligence over the years have both nurtured and sharpened the project. I am also grateful to Hal Foster, Mark Wigley, and Brigid Doherty, whose generous comments as readers helped me to expand and refine the text as it moved from dissertation to book. I also thank Felicity D. Scott, Claire Zimmerman, and Alex Kitnick, who read some or all of the manuscript as it was nearly complete; their incisive comments and support propelled it over the finish line. Before being reworked for publication, portions of this text were published in Grey Room and in and Materials, Money, and Crisis (MuMOK, 2014). The book benefited from many opportunities to present work in progress, including at Columbia University’s Theory and History of Media faculty seminar; the Detlef Mertins lectures at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, and Penn Design; the Graham Foundation; the Princeton School of Architecture; the Rewald Seminar at the City University of New York Graduate School; the Berlage 301

Institute at the Technical University, Delft; the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Yale University School of Architecture; and Artists’ Space, New York; and at conferences of the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians. For these invitations, and for the insights and comments offered on these occasions, I thank Stan Allen, Amale Andraos, Barry Bergdoll, Richard Birkett, Claire Bishop, Kaira Cabañas, Jean-­Louis Cohen, Edward Dimendberg, Keller Easterling, Noam M. Elcott, Solomon Frausto, Romy Golan, Sarah Herda, David Joselit, Mari Lending, Sam Lewitt, Reinhold Martin, Véron­ique Patteeuw, Eeva-­Liisa Pelkonen, Anson Rabinbach, Felicity D. Scott, Léa-­Catherine Szacka, Alice Twemlow, Anthony Vidler, Enrique Walker, Sarah Whiting, and Siona Wilson. Conversations and friendships with new colleagues at Yale in the Department of the History of Art, in the School of Architecture, and in the Program in Film and Media Studies have stimulated my thinking in new ways as I completed the book. My thanks go to the many librarians, curators, and archivists who facilitated the research and helped procure or produce artwork for publication: the staff at Avery Library, Columbia University; the staff of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Center for British Art, Yale University; the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; the Architecture and Design department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Architecture and Design department at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Architekturzentrum, Vienna; the Design Archives at the University of Brighton; the Department of Typography at the University of Reading; and the Special Collections of the Tate Modern, London. I am very grateful for the diligent work of Maxfield Fulton, my research assistant, and of Nicole Chardiet, business manager for the Yale Department of the History of Art, without whom this book would be bereft of many illustrations. Sincere thanks are due Pieter Martin, Anne Carter, Paula Dragosh, and Laura Westlund, together with the editorial board and staff of the University of Minnesota Press, for their unfailing professionalism, support, and patience in making this book. A number of fellowships enabled the research for Graphic Assembly. I would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Research Fellowship funding from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Proctor and Shanley Fellowships from Princeton University School of Architecture, and an award from the A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Fund at Yale University. The book’s production was supported by Yale’s Frederick W. Hilles Fund, the publications fund of the History of Art Department, Yale, and the Barr Ferree Publication Fund of the Art and Archaeology Department, Princeton. 302 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book bears many traces, both direct and indirect, of the intelligence and camaraderie of valued friends and colleagues, including Pep Avilés, Cesare Birignani, Jocelyn Froimovich, Urtzi Grau, Joaquim Moreno, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Irene Sunwoo, Daniel Talesnik, Anna Puigjaner, Meredith Tenhoor, Federica Vannucchi, Jean-­Louis Violeau, and Mark Wasiuta. Finally, I thank my family. The love and support of my sister, Michelle, and mother, Ruth, have sustained me over the years. My father, Del Buckley, has been an important influence on this journey, though he did not live to see it. My wife, Rey, and daughter, Peri, have encouraged me through the years of writing these pages and taught me things that I never could have seen on my own. I dedicate the book to them.

303 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Hans Hollein, “A Comment from Hans Hollein,” in Archigram (London: Studio Vista Publishers, 1972), 6. 2. As Herron’s Archigram colleague Warren Chalk later wrote, the Shivering Sands forts were more than a formal source: the pirate broadcasting launched there was exemplary of the way new communications media might transform the future conception of architecture’s role. “As in the instance of the Thames forts . . . where an apparatus of war at one moment in time was later thrown out and replaced by pop-­music transmitters, so, in the fabric of future cities, the ‘architecture’ can be conceived as an adaptable megasystem cradling a continually changing range of media” (Chalk, “Hardware of a New World,” Architectural ­Forum 125, no. 3 [October 1966]: 48). 3. The photomontage echoes the architect’s contemporaneous meditations on the complicity of visionary architecture with urban demolition, intended to trouble what he called the metabolist movement’s “rose-­tinted” projection of a city of the future. Here a key metabolist preoccupation—­aerial cities—­came together with ruination, an obsession that was itself a trace of Isozaki’s experience of bombing during World War II. See Isozaki, “City Demolition Inc.,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 853–­58; originally published in Japanese as “Toshi hakaigyo KK,” Shinkenchiku (Japan Architect) (September 1962). For Isozaki’s reflections on ruins, see Isozaki, Japan-­ness in Architecture, translated by Sabu Kohso, edited by David B. Stewart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 83–­86; and Isozaki, “Ruins,” in Arata Isozaki, edited by Ken Tadashi Oshima (London: Phaidon, 2009), 29–­30. 4. Isozaki’s photomontage first appeared in the small Japanese art magazine ­Bijutsu Techo in 1962; Herron’s appeared in the fifth issue of Archigram in 1964, and Hollein’s appeared in the first issue of Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städte­bau in 1965, the magazine of the Central Association of Austrian Architects that he, together with younger colleagues, had taken over and radically transformed that year.

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5. The historical overviews of photomontage are numerous. Among the most indispensable, see Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976); Robert Sobiesek, “Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage, Pt. 1: The Naturalistic Strain,” Artforum, September 1978, 58–­65; Sobiesek, “Pt.  2: The Formalist Strain,” Artforum, October 1978, 40–­45; Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life: 1919–­1942 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik: Dada Berlin—­Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2000); and Adrian Sudhalter, Photomontage between the Wars, 1918–­1939 (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2012). 6. For historical overviews, see Ades, Photomontage, 7–­39; and Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 11–­36. 7. The assumption that processes of montage are visually unified in contrast to the fragmented qualities of collage ignores the emphatic manner in which the apparent unity of montage can nonetheless stress rupture and disruption. By the same token, defining collage in terms of the rupturing of pictorial unity flies in the face of Clement Greenberg’s definition, in which the flattened, optical-­ formal unity of collage was precisely what raised it above the “literary shock effects” of montage that he found derisory. See Greenberg, “Review of the Exhibition Collage,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 260. 8. The emphasis on translation is indebted to Robin Evans’s analyses of the relation between drawing and building. See Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building,” AA Files 12 (Summer 1986), reprinted in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association Press, 1997), 153–­94. 9. In retrospective accounts, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch all laid claim to the discovery or invention of montage between 1916 and 1918. For an incisive survey of these claims that distinguishes between Höch’s vision of continuity with popular photographic practices and Grosz’s, Hausmann’s, and Heartfield’s claims to invention, see Brigid Doherty, “Berlin,” in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris, New York (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2006), 84–­113. Gustav Klutsis and Alexander Rodchenko were among the first to take up the technique in the Soviet Union. For an account of the Soviet context, see Margarita Tupitsyn, “Lenin’s Death and the Birth of Political Photomontage,” in The Soviet Photograph, 1924–­1937 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 9–­34. 10. The earliest dated avant-garde photomontages, in both Berlin and Moscow, are from 1919. A few of these early works, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield’s Sonniges Land (1919), were signed mont. or monteur. The appearance of the term photomontage in print arrives much later in the 1920s. One of the earliest, if not the first, is the unsigned article “Foto-­montazh,” Lef 4 (1924): 41–­44, translated in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Criti­ cal Writings, 1913–­1940, edited by Christopher Phillips (New York: Aperture, 1989), 211–­12. According to Adrian Sudhalter, fotomontage appears in German for the first time in László Moholy-­Nagy’s Malerei Fotographie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). See Sudhalter, “Fotomontage,” in Photomontage between the Wars, 1918–­1939 (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2012), 9–­22. 306 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

11. “Montage—­the action of the one who hauls up and facilitates the lifting of boats.” See Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, 5th ed. (1798) (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2011 edition), edited by Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. 12. “Montage—­Action de monter. Payer le montage du bois, des grains,” Diction­ naire de l’académie française, 4th ed., vol. 2 (Paris, 1762). 13. Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie. The entry for monter notes: “One sees that in almost all these acceptations it expresses, literally or figuratively, the act of passing from a lower to a higher situation” (“on voit que dans presque toutes ces acceptions il exprime ou simplement ou figurément l’action de passer d’une situation à une plus élevée”). 14. “Montage—­Action de disposer dans l’ordre voulu les pièces d’une machine. Le montage d’une filature” (Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 3 [Paris, 1874]). “L’action de porter ou de mettre quelque chose dans un endroit plus élevé. Le montage des pierres, des briques, moellons, pieces de bois, etc., se fait au moyen de cordes ou de chaines; de bourriquets, de grues, de chèvres, ou de treuils” (Trésor de la langue française, vol. 2 [Paris, 1876]). 15. Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-­Art, translated by David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 118. 16. László Moholy-­Nagy, Malerei Fotographie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), translated as Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969); and Moholy-­Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Munich: Albert Langen, 1929), translated as The New Vision (New York: Wittenborn, 1946). 17. Martino Stierli’s Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018) promises a more comprehensive account, though the book was not yet available at the time of writing. 18. See, for instance, Beatriz Colomina, “The Endless Museum,” in When Things Cast No Shadow (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008), 182–­86; Andres Lepik, “Mies and Photomontage,” in Mies in Berlin, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Terence Riley (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 324–­29; Neil Levine, “The Significance of Facts: Mies’ Collages Up Close and Personal,” Assemblage 37 (December 1998): 70–­111; Detlef Mertins, Mies (New York: Phaidon, 2014); Martino Stierli, “Mies Montage,” AA Files 61 (2010): 64–­67; and Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). The corpus of Mies’s montages and collages has recently been collected, with a range of new interpretations, in Andreas Beitin, Wolf Eiermann, and Brigitte Franzen, eds., Mies van der Rohe: Montage Collage (Aachen: Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, 2017). 19. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984): 82–­119; Romy Golan, “Photomurals Real and Painted,” in Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–­1957 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 123–­80; Ulrich Pohlmann, “El Lissitzky’s Exhibition Designs,” in El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration, edited by Margaret Tupitsyn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University 307 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Press, 1999), 52–­64; and Daniel Naegele, “Le Corbusier and the Space of Photography: Photo-­murals, Pavilions, and Multimedia Spectacles,” History of Photography 22, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 127–­38. 20. Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928). The book’s cover and layout were designed by Moholy-­Nagy. Such techniques were also evident in his small book Befreites Wohnen (Zurich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 1929). A student of Heinrich Wölfflin, Giedion would also have been trained in a method of reading images that depended on the juxtaposed comparison of lantern slides. On Giedion’s active involvement in shooting, selecting, and laying out the images in his books, see Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie: Bildinszenierungen der Moderne, edited by Werner Oechslin und Gregor Harbusch (Zurich: GTA Verlag, 2010). The photomontage that Giedion included in Space, Time, and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941) is analyzed in chapter 3. 21. Banham’s reading of collage was skeptical about “attempts to compare buildings of the ‘International Style’ with Cubist paintings,” indicating his critique of Giedion. See Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), 204. 22. Benevolo includes Mies’s photomontage of an office building on Leipziger Strasse as well as his plan for Berlin’s Alexanderplatz (both 1928). See Benevolo, Storia dell’architettura moderna (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1960), 450, 453. 23. Manfredo Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,” Contropiano 1 (1969): 52; Tafuri, “Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architectural Theory since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 18, author’s translation. Stephen Sartarelli translates montaggio as “assembly” and “assemblage.” Tafuri further explored the role of montage via Sergei Eisenstein’s interest in Piranesi, in “Piranesi, Eisenstein e la dialettica dell’avanguardia,” Rassegna Sovietica 1–­2 (1972): 174–­84; and Tafuri, “Piranesi and the Fluidity of Forms,” in Oppositions 11 (Winter 1977): 72–­80. 24. Tafuri’s account of the avant-­garde drew on, and criticized, Renato Poggioli’s groundbreaking Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962). For a compelling comparative account of the status of the negative in Tafuri’s thinking on the avant-­garde, see Gail Day, “Looking the Negative in the Face: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture,” in Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 25. See Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-­Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), originally published as Theorie der Avant-­Garde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). Tafuri’s remarks allude both to Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and to his more famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Adorno’s most extensive remarks on montage appear in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 26. See, in particular, Manfredo Tafuri, “L’architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” Oppositions 3 (May 1974): 54;

308 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

and Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976). 27. One might compare the remarks on montage in Georges Didi-­Huberman, ­L’image survivante (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002); Didi-­Huberman, Atlas: ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas? (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010); and Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2004); as well as W. J. T. Mitchell, “W. J. T. Mitchell: Method, Madness, Montage” (lecture, Warburg Institute, June 2016). 28. For an active rethinking of Bürger’s accounts of the avant-­garde, see Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-­Avant-­Garde?,” October 70 (Fall 1994): 5–­32; and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, introduction to Neo-­Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955–­1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), xvii–­xxxiii. Drawing on a Deleuzian theorization of capitalism, Branden Joseph has productively questioned the neo-­avant-­garde interpretation of Robert Rauschenberg’s work. See Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). K. Michael Hays has recently theorized a “late,” rather than neo, avant-­garde, in Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). 29. A skeptical survey of the various claims to invention appears in Ades, Photo­ montage, 19–­23. Brigid Doherty offers a thorough and fascinating critique  of the narratives of invention among Berlin Dada artists in “The ‘Invention’  of Montage,” in Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916–­1920 (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996). The literature on nineteenth-­century photocollage and combination photography has grown in recent years. See Elizabeth Siegel, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); and Mia Fineman, ed., Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012). 30. See Sobiesek, “Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage,” 58–­65. 31. Lepik, “Mies and Photomontage,” 324. 32. Recent scholarship has argued that these photomontages were not likely submitted to the competition at all but created subsequently for exhibition and publication. See Andreas Marx and Paul Weber, “Konventioneller Kontext der Moderne: Mies van der Rohes Haus Kempner 1921–­23. Ausgangspunkt einer Neubewertung des Hochhauses Friedrichstraße,” in Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Jürgen Wetzel (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2003), 82–­83. See also Mertins, Mies, 58–­80. For an exhaustive account, see Adrian Sudhalter, “Friedrichstrasse: The Contexts of an Image, 1922–­24,” in Beitin, Eiermann, and Franzen, Mies van der Rohe, 68–­85. On Mies’s practice of photographing models of the towers, see Spyros Papapetros, “Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film—­from Mies to Murnau,” Grey Room 20 (Summer 2005): 6–­37. 33. Writing of his design in 1922, Mies noted that “it is not an interplay of light and shadow that one wants to achieve, but a rich interplay of light reflections”

309 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

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(“Hochhaus Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse,” Frühlicht 1, no. 4 [1922]: 124, translation from Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], 240). Reyner Banham, “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture,” New Society 7, no. 179 (1966): 21. Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building (1452) has long been regarded as pivotal for the articulation of this distinction. See Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert with Neil Leach and Robert Taver­ nor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). Recently, Mario Carpo has made Alberti’s treatise central to periodizing the division between analog and digital technologies. Alberti, he argues, inaugurated a “paradigm of identicality”—­the principle that the building was to be made as identical as possible to the architect’s drawing—­which the recent potential for variability in digital technologies has both superseded and undone. See Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). Notions of Gestaltung can ultimately be traced back to the influence of Goethe’s morphological thinking on nineteenth-­century science. As Caroline van Eck has noted, Gestaltung entailed a conception of purposive unity logically prior to the existence of any particular part, and would thus be able to determine the nature of the organs and their manner of relation. See van Eck, Organicism in Nineteenth-­Century Architecture (Amsterdam: Art and Natura Press, 1994). Such unity was not restricted to living creatures but could include mechanisms as well, as became evident when concepts of Gestaltung were taken up by the most technologically and industrially inclined avant-­gardes of the 1920s, as has been persuasively argued by Detlef Mertins in “Bio-­Constructivisms,” in Modernity Unbound (London: Architectural Association, 2011). See also Frederick J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); and Detlef Mertins and Michael Jennings, “The G-­Group and the European Avant-­Garde,” in G: An Avant-­Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–­1926 (Los ­Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). The relation of discourses of technological transfer to clip-­on architecture is considered in chapter 1. Julien Guadet, Éléments et théorie de l’architecture; cours professé à l’École nationale et spéciale des beaux-­arts (Paris: Librarie de la construction moderne, 1901–­1904). Gaudet’s compendium built on the earlier work of J. N. L. Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique (Paris: J. Durand, 1802–­5). On the theories of elemental composition, see Jacques Lucan, Composition, Non-­Composition: Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Routledge, 2012); and Antoine Picon, Introduction to Précis of the Lectures on Architecture, with Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture, translated by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 1–­72. The foundational theories of postindustrial society are Alain Touraine, La société post-­industrielle (Paris: Denoel, 1969); and Daniel Bell, The Coming of

Post-­Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 40. Such a conceptual technique was bound up with filmic montage yet not always achieved using film. My account of this mode builds on Beatriz Colomina’s analysis of the “logic of information flow” in the Eameses’ multiscreen film works, which she traces back to their engagement with information theory in the early 1950s. See Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (2001): 6–­29. 41. Eisenstein produced a great number of montage concepts during his career. Perhaps the most canonical and succinct statement is “Methods of Montage” (1929), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 72–­83. For a comprehensive account of Eisenstein’s theories of montage, see Antonio Somaini, Ejzenstejn: Il Cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 2011). 42. For an approach that stresses collage as a design method, see Jennifer Shields, Collage and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2015). 43. The German notion of Kulturtechniken covers a variety of approaches, which are by no means uniform. The debate has developed from, and also offered correctives to, the media analysis of Friedrich Kittler. For an overview, see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and Cornelia Vissman, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 1–­11. For recent assessments coming from the architectural discipline, see Reinhold Martin, “Unfolded, Not Opened: On Bernhard Siegert’s Cultural Techniques,” Grey Room 62 (2016): 102–­15; Mary Louise Lobsinger, “The Turn from Culture to Media,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 2 (June 2016): 135–­39. For a helpful overview, see Bernard Geoghegan, “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 66–­82. 44. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 21. Siegert here reprises a concept of communication drawn from the work of Michel Serres. 45. See, for instance, Cerwin Robinson and Joel Hershman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Rolf Sachsse, Bild und Bau: Zur Nutzung technischer Medien beim Entwerfen von Architektur (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1997); Robert Elwall, Building with Light: The International History of Architectural Photography (London: Merrell, 2004); and most recently Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture. 46. Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, translated by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 47. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 20. 48. See, for instance, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); and Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

311 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

49. For a detailed account of these processes, see Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Bowker, 1974). For a succinct account of a range of techniques, see Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008). 50. On these early composite images in advertising culture, see Sally Stein, “The Composite Photographic Image and the Composition of Consumer Ideology,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 39–­45. On photomontage postcards, see Clement Chéroux, ed., The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards (Gottingen: Steidl, 2007). 51. Detailed descriptions of the work methods of process engraving appear in technical manuals such as Edward S. Pilsworth, Process Engraving: Formulas, Equipment, and Methods of Working (New York: Macmillan, 1922). 52. For overviews of rotogravure printing, see Alexander Braun, Der Tiefdruck, seine Verfahren und Maschinen (Frankfurt am Main: Polygraph Verlag, 1952), 29–­34; and Herbert Mills Cartwright, Photogravure: A Text Book on the Machine and Hand-­Printed Processes (Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1939). Michel Frizot’s work on illustrated photographic magazines in the interwar years has productively emphasized the relationship between rotogravure and montage. See Frizot, Photo/Graphics in French Magazines, the Possibilities of Rotogravure, 1926–­1935 (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2008), 5–­12. 53. This point is stressed in Frizot, Photo/Graphics in French Magazines, 10. 54. On the layouts of Vu, see Frizot and Cédric de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009); on USSR in construction, see Katarina Romanenko, “Photomontage for the Masses: The Soviet Periodical Press of the 1930s,” Design Issues 26, no. 1 (2010): 29–­45; and on rotogravure and Heartfield, see Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 55. Marshall McLuhan, “Electronics and the Changing Role of Print,” Audio Visual Communication Review 8, no. 5 (1960): 75. 56. McLuhan, “Electronics,” 77. 57. Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970). 58. Cook, Experimental Architecture, 13. On the importance of photo-­offset lithography to the underground press, see Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 21; and Stephen Heller, From Merz to Émigré and Beyond: Avant-­Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (London: Phaidon, 2003), 186–­87. The significance of offset lithographic processes has been remarked on by many historians of graphic design, but has not received sustained historical attention. The technique of “offsetting”—­transferring the image from a lithographic surface to a rubber sheet before impression onto paper, is generally credited to Ira Rubel of New Jersey, who developed a system for banknote printing in the first decade of the twentieth century. Offset lithography was taken up earlier in Germany, notably at Berlin’s Malik Verlag, which engaged photomontage for its book covers. In much of Western Europe and the United States, photo-offset lithography became a major force for the mass production of books and magazines only after World War II, when processes for automating web-­fed presses 312 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

and photo-­sensitized plates were perfected. Printer’s manuals from the period provide some of the best accounts. See Robin Kinross, Modern Typography (London: Hyphen, 1992), 26–­27; L. E. Lawson, Offset Lithography (London: Vista Books, 1963); and Godfried Bomans, From Lithography to Photo-­Offset, 1830–­1955 (Weert, Netherlands: Smeets, 1955). See also Wolfgang Hesse, ed., Fotografie gedruckt: Beiträge einer Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe Fotografie im Museum (Göppingen, Germany: Museumsverband Baden-­Württemberg e.V., 1998). 59. Cook, Experimental Architecture, 7. 60. Cook, Experimental Architecture, 14. Cook’s skepticism about individual heroism was in distinct contrast to his former teachers, Alison and Peter Smithson, who had portrayed the interwar years as modern architecture’s “heroic period.” See Smithson and Smithson, “The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, 1917–­1937,” Architectural Design 35, no. 12 (December 1965). 61. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). 62. The importance of cheap, large-­format, full-­color mass magazines has long been given a pivotal place in accounts of the Independent Group and the formation of pop art. What has perhaps not been sufficiently understood is the larger media-­technical shift that these new genres of printed matter instantiated. See David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–­59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and October 94 (2000), special issue on the Independent Group. 63. See, for instance, the contributions by Beatriz Colomina, Jean-­Louis Cohen, K. Michael Hays, and Joan Ockman in Architecture Production, edited by Bea­ triz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 6–­24; and Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 64. See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and Anthony Vidler, “Metropolitan Montage,” in Warped Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 65. See Elwall, Building with Light; and Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture. 66. See Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); and Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-­Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). 67. This formulation echoes Siegert’s argument about the role of the grid in Renaissance drawing practice. See Cultural Techniques, 122.

1. CLIPPING 1. Reyner Banham, “A Clip-­On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1965): 2–­30. 2. Reyner Banham, “The Spec Builders: Towards a Pop Architecture,” Architectural Review 132, no. 785 (July 1962): 43–­46. On Banham and pop, see Hal Foster, “On 313 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

the First Pop Age,” New Left Review 19 (January–­February 2003); and Foster, The Art-­Architecture Complex (New York: Verso, 2011). 3. On the article in the context of Banham’s career, see Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). On the relationship between Banham and Archigram, see Anthony Vidler, “Toward a Theory of Architectural Program,” October 106 (Fall 2003): 59–­74; Hadas Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2009); Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 4. Banham’s sources were Richard Llewellyn-­Davies, “Endless Architecture,” ­Architectural Association Journal 67 (1951): 106–­12; and Gerhard Kallman, “Towards a New Environment,” Architectural Review 58, no. 648 (1950): 406–­14. 5. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 5. 6. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 8. 7. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 10. 8. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 11. 9. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960). 10. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 30. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 8. 15. Lawrence Alloway, Collages and Objects (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1954), n.p. The exhibition took place from October 13 to November 20, 1954. 16. Reyner Banham, “Collages at ICA,” Art News and Review 6 (October 30, 1954): 8. 17. See Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 78. For Greenberg’s rival interpretation, which stressed the play of illusory relationships between shallow, optical-­tactile surfaces and the flatness of the support in cubist collage, see “Collage” (1959), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 70–­83. In Paris, Jean Dubuffet—­a figure well known among members of the IG—­also stressed the importance of materials, and used the term assemblage to differentiate his works from the prewar lineage of cubist collage. His contemporaries Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé developed a notion of “décollage” to emphasize the subtractive procedures that attracted them to anonymously torn posters and billboards. Dubuffet was a key source for William Seitz’s use of assemblage in his landmark exhibition The Art of Assemblage. See The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). For a larger overview of the impact of Cubism within architectural culture, see the essays collected in Architecture and Cubism, edited by Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 18. Ian Hacking has analyzed the opposition between transparency and opacity as emblematic of two models of vision separating Cartesian rationalism from sensationalist empiricism in Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 33–­34. 314 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

19. Banham, Theory and Design, 20. 20. Banham, Theory and Design, 20. Banham quotes Guadet directly on this point, noting that “the elements are ‘ce qu’on sait,’ . . . composition is the manner of putting them together.” 21. Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture, 278–­79. 22. Banham noted that it was only in the wake of World War II that such methods “had ceased to be unquestionable,” and that the inheritors of the Academic tradition felt compelled to justify its central principles (Theory and Design, 16). 23. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118, no. 78 (December 1955): 355–­61. 24. See, for instance, Hal Foster, “Savage Minds,” October 136 (Spring 2011): 182–­91; Vidler, “Toward a Theory of Architectural Program”; and Laurent Stalder, “ ‘New Brutalism,’ ‘Topology,’ and ‘Image’: Some Remarks on the Architectural Debates in England around 1950,” Journal of Architecture 13, no. 3 (2008): 263–­81. 25. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 358. Banham attributed this formality not to the Beaux-­Arts directly but to the widespread influence of Rudolf Wittkower’s analy­sis of centrally planned Renaissance churches in his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1948). 26. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 358. 27. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 358. 28. On the exhibitions of Bayer, see Arthur Cohen, Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); and Patrik Rossler, Herbert Bayer: die Berliner Jahre—­ Werbegrafik 1928–­ 1938 (Berlin: Vergangenheitsverlag, 2013). 29. Fred Turner has revisited this genealogy to stress its links with social science and anthropology circa World War II. See Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Another important source was the exhibition The New Landscape in Art and Science (1951), organized by György Kepes at MIT. 30. Henderson reputedly used a turn-­of-­the-­century plate camera to make the enlargements. See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). 31. Banham, “Photography—­Parallel of Life and Art,” Architectural Review 114, no. 682 (October 1953): 260–­61. 32. Banham, “Photography,” 260. 33. Banham, “Photography,” 260. 34. Banham, “Photography,” 260. 35. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 361. 36. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Des Canons, Des Munitions? Merci, des ­Logis SVP (Paris [Boulogne]: Éditions de l’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1938). On the murals at the pavilion, see Romy Golan, “Paris: A Cardboard Promenade,” in Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, edited by Jean-­Louis Cohen (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 282–­89; and Daniele Nagele, “Le Corbusier and the Space of Photography: Photomurals, Pavilions, and Multimedia Spectacles,” History of Photography 22, no. 2 (1998): 127–­38. 315 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

37. Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Des Canons, Des Munitions? Golan has identified this figure as Le Corbusier’s wife, Yvonne Gallis, in the couple’s apartment on the rue Nungesser-­et-­Coli. 38. Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Des Canons, Des Munitions?: “une cellule d’habitation permettant la meditation dans le silence.” 39. On the photomontage, see Dirk van den Heuvel, “Golden Lane Housing,” in Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House of the Future to a House of Today, edited by Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Risselada (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004), 62–­66; and Ben Highmore, “Streets in the Air: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Doorstep Philosophy,” in Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern Architecture in Britain and Beyond, Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds. (New ­Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 79–102. 40. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 361. 41. The relationship of the Ville Radieuse to Fordist production methods was made explicit in the third volume of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Oeuvre complète, which contained the introductory text “Méditation sur Ford.” Le Corbu­ sier and Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète, 1934–­1938 (Zurich: H. Girsberger, 1939), 16–­17. Historians have contrasted sharply on the Smithsons’ attitude to such a shift in consumer culture. David Robbins saw the IG’s fascination with Ameri­ can culture as naive, whereas Hal Foster has more recently argued that the shift from production-­to consumer-­oriented economic models represented a primary contradiction facing members of the Independent Group. See David Robbins, “American Ads,” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 59; and Foster, “Savage Minds,” 189. 42. Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 58. 43. “Machine Made America,” special issue edited by Ian McCallum, Architectural Review 121, no. 724 (May 1957): 388. 44. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 317. 45. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 321. 46. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 299, 308. 47. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 299. 48. Roger Walters, “Towards Industrialized Building,” RIBA Journal, February 1957. For a larger overview of the industrialization of British construction work, see Christine Wall, An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers, and Industrialization in Britain, 1940–­1970 (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2013). 49. Walters, “Towards Industrialized Building,” 150. 50. Walters credits the term assembler-­jointer to William Tatton Brown, an architect and planner who had worked with Berthold Lubetkin’s office Tecton. 51. Walters, “Towards Industrialized Building,” 153. 52. Walters, “Towards Industrialized Building,” 153. 53. The issue noted that Walter Gropius “of all contemporary architectural propagandists has thought most deeply about the implications of technology in building” (McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 388). Gropius refers to the

316 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

“fatal gap” in “The Architect within Our Industrial Society,” in The Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Harper, 1955), 77. 54. Gropius, “Architect within Our Industrial Society,” 76. Originally published as “Gropius Appraises Today’s Architect,” Architectural Forum, May 1952. 55. Gropius, “Architect within Our Industrial Society,” 76. 56. Gropius, “Architect within Our Industrial Society,” 80. 57. The practice was widespread among members of the IG. Alison and Peter Smithson were active collectors of illustrated magazine advertisements, a practice which they reflect on in “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 18 (November 1956): 49–50. Several dozen of the tear sheets from McHale’s collection are today in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. I am grateful to Elisabeth Fairman, Chief Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts for our stimulating conversations about the McHale collection. 58. Lawrence Alloway, John McHale Collages (London: ICA, 1956), n.p. 59. John McHale, Three Collagists, exh. cat. (London: ICA, 1958), n.p. 60. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 298. 61. Alloway, John McHale Collages, n.p. 62. Josef Albers, The Interaction of Color (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963). 63. In McHale’s “ikons,” the cultural opposition between organic and mechanical, which still featured in many of the dramatic human–­machine collisions in the work of Berlin Dadaists, no longer seems primary. 64. Richard Hamilton described his collage as a “tabular” image, constructed from an inventory of the themes deployed by contemporary advertising. Hamilton assembled his photocollage from pages that Magda Cordell and his wife, Terry, had clipped from the magazines according to an iconographic list he had drawn up. These included “Man, Woman, Humanity, History, Food, Newspaper, Cinema, TV, Telephone, Comics (picture information), Words (textual information), Tape recording (aural information), Cars, Domestic appliances, Space.” See Richard Hamilton, Collected Words (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 24. For the most thorough account of the work, see John Paul Stonard, “Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, . . .” Burlington Magazine 149 (September 2007): 607–­20. The implications of the tabular image have been explored by Foster in “On the First Pop Age”; and by William R. Kaizen, “Richard Hamilton’s Tabular Image,” October 94 (Autumn 2000): 113–­28. 65. McCallum, “Machine Made America,” 389. 66. On McHale’s short-­lived experiments with sculptures that were to be put together by the spectator, see Lawrence Alloway, “L’intervention du spectateur,” Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture, November 1955, 25–­26. 67. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3–­6. Originally published in Art 1 (September 1955): 3. It was a subject on which he had lectured earlier that year at an Independent Group meeting. 68. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 6.

317 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

69. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 7. 70. Ernest Dichter’s Strategy of Desire was recognized as an early instance of psycho­analytically informed “motivational research.” See Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960). 71. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 5. 72. In another article from 1955, concerned with the “aesthetics of expendability,” Banham described a “language of signs which are as immediately legible as dropped neckline or a raised eyebrow.” See Banham, “Space for Decoration,” Design, July 1955, 24–­25. 73. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 5. 74. In Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride, of considerable importance for both McHale and Banham, the media theorist invoked a related metaphor. Citing Edgar Allan Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” McLuhan proposed analysis as something internal to a flow of images rather than at a contemplative distance from, or in opposition to, them. See McLuhan, preface to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). 75. John McHale, “The Expendable Ikon 1 and 2,” Architectural Design, February and March 1959, 82–­84, 116–­17. On the place of these articles in McHale’s career, see Alex Kitnick’s and Mark Wigley’s essays in John McHale: The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media (1951–­79) (New York: GSAPP Books, 2011). 76. McHale, “Expendable Ikon 1,” 82. McHale’s expendable icons entailed a different sense of mediation from that developed in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Whereas Benjamin saw reproducibility as a force that drained aura from the original, McHale linked expendable icons to religious icons, replicas, and relics, a situation in which reproduction was a conduit for the imagined power of the original. He later described this process as the “transference of symbolic affect” and as a quasi-­magical attraction. McHale, like Banham, avoided any effort to link this magical quality with Marxist notions of commodity fetishism. See McHale, “Plastic Parthenon,” Dot Zero 3 (Spring 1967): 4–­11. 77. McHale, “Expendable Ikon 1,” 82. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 5; “Expendable Ikon 1,” 82. 81. See Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 (1960): 25–­26. While it appeared in print in 1960, McHale had cited it already in 1955, noting Alloway’s “fine art/popular art continuum” as a characteristic separating postwar culture from that of the Bauhaus. McHale, “Gropius and the Bauhaus,” in Art (1955), reprinted in The Independent Group. The comment was made in the context of a review of Sigfried Giedion’s Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork (New York: Reinhold, 1954). 82. Alloway, “Long Front of Culture,” 25. 83. See Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–­59 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995), 44–­46; and Robbins, Independent Group. 318 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

84. Alloway, “Long Front of Culture,” 25. 85. Alloway highlights the rejection of universalist principles in his introduction to the catalog, “Design as Human Activity,” in This Is Tomorrow, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1956). 86. The initial impetus for the exhibition came from the painter Paule Vézelay, English representative of the Paris-­based Groupe Espace, an organization headed by André Bloc and devoted to bringing about “la synthèse des arts majeurs.” For the most detailed account of the exhibition’s formation, see Alastair Grieve, “ ‘This Is Tomorrow,’ a Remarkable Exhibition Born from Contention,” Bur­ling­ton Magazine 136, no. 1093 (1994): 225–­32. For an account that stresses the IG contributions, see Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–­59, 95–­107. For Crosby’s recollection, see “Night Thoughts on a Faded Utopia,” in Independent Group, 197–­99. 87. Lawrence Alloway, Geoffrey Holroyd, Tony del Renzio, “Group 12,” in This Is Tomorrow, n.p. 88. Theo Crosby, Edward Wright, William Turnbull, Germano Facetti, “Group One Statement,” in This Is Tomorrow, n.p. 89. Crosby et al., “Group One Statement.” 90. Crosby et al., “Group One Statement.” “Every strut,” Crosby explained, “is interdependent, and loads are resolved and distributed over the whole area.” 91. “The space deck roof,” Crosby noted, “symbolizes the mechanical environment” (“This Is Tomorrow,” Architectural Design, October 1956, 334). 92. Many of these photocollages were realized by or with students at IIT, a number of whom later worked in Mies’s office. See Mertins, Mies, 283–­85. 93. See Levine, “Significance of Facts,” 77. Levine highlights the degree to which the material nature of the photocollage, and its direct connection to wartime production, was conspicuously avoided in discussions of the work, which tended to stress the importance of form and abstraction. 94. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 84. 95. See Edward Wright: Graphic Work and Painting (London: Arts Council, 1985); and Craig Buckley, “Graphic Constructions: The Experimental Typography of Edward Wright,” October 136 (Spring 2011): 156–­81. Crosby notes Wright’s lessons in graphic design in Crosby, “Night Thoughts on a Faded Utopia,” 197. 96. For an overview, see the introduction to the present volume. The situation in Britain is briefly noted in Robin Kinross, Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History (London: Hyphen, 1992); and Ruari McLean, Magazine Design (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 97. Offset lithography in 1956 was not yet cheap. The costs associated with printing the small catalog amounted to nearly double the construction and material budget for the installation of the exhibition itself. Even though the catalog sold out and was reprinted, debt remained at the end of the exhibition that was eventually defrayed by the participating artists and architects when the printer threatened to sue. See Archive Exhibition Files, WAG/EXH/2/45/3, White­ chapel Gallery, London. 319 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

98. Immediately after the opening, the Whitechapel contacted Crosby with a request that each exhibit be numbered and that a cheaper set of catalogs be printed. Crosby refused, fearing didacticism and potential loss of revenue from catalog sales. It was agreed that a few catalogs be made available to visitors for use as an exhibition guide. See Archive Exhibition Files, WAG/EXH/2/45/1, “Memorandum This Is Tomorrow,” August 10, 1956; and Theo Crosby to Mrs. Forsdyke, August 10, 1956, Whitechapel Gallery, London. 99. The catalog states: “Each group is responsible for its own contribution and manner of presentation” (This Is Tomorrow, n.p.). 100. As Archigram’s Ron Herron would recall, “The catalogue of the This is Tomorrow exhibition became a much prized possession and was often referred to when the early Archigram exhibition work was being discussed” (Herron, “Archigram Drawing,” unpublished manuscript, Archigram Archival Project, http:// archigram.westminster.ac.uk/essay.php?id=280). 101. Beatriz Colomina, “The Endless Museum: Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe,” When Things Cast No Shadow, edited by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic (Berlin: Kunstwerke, 2008), 182–­85. 102. See Crosby, “This Is Tomorrow,” 334; and Robbins, Independent Group, 137. The catalog pages for Group One included further indexical signs suggesting spatial and graphic indicators, including a printer’s fist and a one-­way street sign. 103. Crosby, “This Is Tomorrow,” 334. 104. Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking 1960,” Architectural Review 127, no. 756 (February 1960): 93–­101. Banham’s enthusiasm for technology was fueled by his unease with postwar historicist revivals—­from the New Empiricism in Scandinavia and Neoliberty in Italy, to the classicizing formalism of the middle generation of American architects such as Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson, and The Architects Collaborative. 105. Banham, “On Trial: What Architecture of Technology?,” Architectural Review 131, no. 780 (February 1960): 97. Banham was referring to Peter Smithson’s brief text in The Architecture of Technology, edited by Theo Crosby (London: Whitefriars, 1961). 106. Banham, “On Trial,” 98. 107. The term operational lore was central to these articles and had been borrowed from Charles Eames’s 1959 lecture at the RIBA. “Stocktaking 1960” defined technology as “the method of exploring, by means of the instrument of science, a potential which may at any moment make nonsense of all existing general knowledge.” See Banham, “Stocktaking 1960,” Architectural Review 127, no. 756 (February 1960): 93. The opening paragraph of Theory and Design had stressed how any meaningful account of the late 1950s should “draw attention to some aspect of the transformation of science and technology, for these transformations have powerfully affected human life, and opened up new paths of choice in the ordering of our collective destiny” (Banham, Theory and Design, 9). 108. Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 562. Marx’s source for the changing meaning of the term was Erik Schatzberg, “Technik comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 486–­512. 320 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1 09. Marx, “Technology,” 568. 110. For the most detailed account, see Theo Crosby, “International Union of Architects Buildings, South Bank,” Architectural Design, November 1961, 484–­506. 111. Construction and materials firms such as Taylor Woodrow, British Aluminum, Cape Building Products, and Pilkington Bros. Ltd., with whom Crosby worked closely, sponsored the buildings. See “Experiment in Integration,” Architectural Design, November 1961, 483. 112. Following the UIA congress, which was awarded the R.S. Reynolds Memorial Award, Crosby was appointed lead architect for Taylor Woodrow’s redevelopment scheme at Euston Station. In this capacity he gathered together all the members of Archigram to serve as part of his design team. In 1963 he was invited to design the British section of the 1964 Milan Triennale devoted to the theme of leisure. 113. Crosby, “Experiment in Integration,” 483. 114. Crosby, “Experiment in Integration,” 483. 115. Crosby, “Experiment in Integration,” 483. 116. Crosby, “International Union of Architects Buildings,” 485. Covering the entirety of the long elevations, the UIA work was the largest project Wright ever realized: 12 feet high by 240 feet long. For a vivid description, see Ken Garland, “The Wright Stuff Writ Large,” in Edward Wright: Readings, Writings (Reading, U.K.: Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, 2007),19–­21. The project essentially reprised and enlarged an experiment that the pair had developed for a temporary exhibition stand for the magazine AD’s twenty-­fifth anniversary at the 1955 Building Exhibition, in which Crosby designed a rough timber structure and Wright conceived a graphic system that would cover the entire surface. 117. The qualities that Wright had explored in his experimental typography exercises, superimposing various kinds of type on the bed of a printing press, were translated into a facade. Hence the qualities of the flat-­bed printing press are both verticalized and made to articulate the difference between inside and out. 118. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 63–­68. 119. As Wright noted, “Many people found the result easy to see but difficult to decipher” (quoted in Crosby, “International Union of Architects Buildings,” 489). 120. Lawrence Alloway, “Criticism,” Architectural Design, November 1961, 508. 121. Alloway, “Criticism,” 507. 122. Banham, “Stocktaking 1960,” 99. 123. Banham, “Stocktaking 1960,” 97. Such an analysis echoed Banham’s arguments in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age about elemental composition as a form of “particulate” assembly derived from academic theory and preserved in the plans of the modern movement. 124. Banham, “Stocktaking 1960,” 98. Banham cites Michael Brawne, “Polyester Fibre­glass,” Architectural Review, December 1959. 125. See, for instance, the criticism of Archigram in the Architectural Association Journal of January 1966, which prompted Banham to write a response. 126. Reyner Banham, “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture,” New Society 179 (March 3, 1966): 21. 321 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

127. Ibid. 128. An advertisement for the Morris Brothers device was included in the first issue of Clip-­Kit: Studies in Environmental Design (1966), n.p. 129. See Charles Kimball, “Technology Transfer,” in Applied Science and Technologi­ cal Progress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1967), 347. 130. Murray and Smyth, “Space Scene Two,” Clip-­Kit: Studies in Environmental Design (1966), n.p. 131. Murray and Smyth, “Space Scene Two.” 132. Kimball, “Technology Transfer,” 350. 133. McHale was likely referring to influential texts such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957).

2. THE INFAMOUS PLUG 1. David Greene, “Video Notebook,” Archigram (London: Studio Vista, 1972), 118. 2. As Cook recalled, “The ‘gram’ aspect was very important. It should not be a magazine, but a gram, like an aerogram or a telegram. That was the key thing, it was not a mag, it was a gram” (Beatriz Colomina et al., “Interview with Peter Cook,” in Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X–­ 197X, edited by Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley [Barcelona: ACTAR Publishers, 2010], 282). A number of excellent monographs have provided detailed surveys of the group’s oeuvre in recent years. See Archigram, exh. cat. (Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994); Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Hadas Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2009). 3. For two accounts of the group’s beginnings, see Colomina et al., “Interview with Peter Cook,” 281–­88; and Kester Rattenbury, “Archigram 1, 1961—­Interview with Dennis Crompton,” Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster. ac.uk/magazine.php?id=96. 4. Archigram, Archigram 7 (1966), n.p. 5. Ibid. 6. Kester Rattenbury, “Dennis Crompton on Archigram 7,” Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/magazine.php?id=102&src=mg. 7. See Sadler, Archigram, 148; Steiner, Beyond Archigram, 163–­64. 8. See Mark Wigley, “Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture,” Assemblage 15 (1991): 7–­29. See also Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 82–­122. 9. Banham, “Clip-­On Architecture,” 11. 10. The press release describes “a complete structure, an organism designed to condition the spectator by cutting him off from the everyday situation, where things are seen in predictable and accepted relationships” (press release, TGA.1.12.150 2/40, typescript in ICA Archive, Tate Gallery). 11. The themes of these areas were Man, Survival, Community, Communication, Movement, Place, and Situation. The surviving drawings reveal that the group went through a range of variations, yet always with an intermedial orientation. 322 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

A section drawing for one of the first schemes schematically indicates oversized words, garish colors, and a cinema projector hidden in the ceiling whose beam was directed toward the floor. 12. This trend was inaugurated by Cook in his introduction to the exhibition was published as a special issue of the ICA’s magazine Living Arts. See Peter Cook, “Introduction,” Living Arts 2 (1963): 69. Cook positioned Living City in a lineage of demonstration exhibitions that had influenced debates over modern architecture in Britain, noting in particular the “great influence” of This Is Tomorrow in 1956. 13. Ron Herron, “The Drawings of Archigram,” unpublished manuscript, December 1979, Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/essay .php?id=280. 14. Archigram 1 (1961). The text read: “Reject—­curtains-­design-­history-­graphpaper. Dig, Accept—­homoegeneity-­travelators-­Monk-­expendability.” On the widespread adoption of gridded paper in the courses of J. N. L. Durand at the École Polytechnique, see Picon, introduction; and Peter Collins, “The Origins of Graph Paper as an Influence on Architectural Design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 21, no. 4 (December 1962): 159–­62. 15. A pivotal event for the group, Living City identified Archigram not solely with the printed publication but with the activities of a group. As with many Archigram projects, there were others working as well. In this case, the exhibition team included the designer Ben Fether and the graphic designer Peter Taylor. 16. On the continuum concept in IG criticism, see Whiteley, Reyner Banham, 101–­12. 17. Crosby led the design of a major mixed-­use development at Euston Station for Taylor Woodrow, a house building and construction firm. Crosby hired the members of Archigram to work on the project in late 1962 and, shortly thereafter, put Archigram in touch with the ICA. He also helped raise funds for the Living City exhibition through the Gulbenkian foundation. For an overview, see Sadler, Archigram, 79–­86. 18. The cluster concept and an argument for greater density were both crucial to the Euston project and the contemporaneous study made of London’s Fulham area (also carried out by Crosby and Archigram members). An analysis of these forms the basis for Crosby’s book Architecture: City Sense (London: Studio Vista, 1965). 19. The disparate montage of materials that lined the interior of Living City was described in similar terms. The catalog described a spectrum of material that ranged “from trivia to valued drawings, and [from] monster versions to minuscule versions of everyday things. This again is a reflection of how the city is seen by different people in different moods. And again they are all equally valid.” See Living Arts 2 (1963): 71. 20. Guy Debord, Guide psychogéographique de Paris (Copenhagen: Permild & Rosengreen, 1957). On the creation of the map, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). 21. Archigram, “Manifesto,” Living Arts 2 (1963): 68. The language of the “total image,” already encountered in chapter 1, featured in IG discussions of the 323 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1950s. Banham valorized the way in which the Smithsons’ photomontages for the Golden Lane Housing competition made human presence a part of the “total image,” the aformal, topological order of overall scheme. John McHale, in his “Expendable Ikon” articles, stressed the importance of studying visual reactions to “a pragmatic total image, built up variously from actual perception and internal association” (“Expendable Ikon 1,” 82). 22. The film critic André Bazin had influentially described the desire to unify the elements of the human sensorium—­sight, sound, movement, and touch—­in a single, synthetic totality in the 1940s, yet the group would not likely have been aware of this formulation. See Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946), reprinted in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–­71), 17–­22. 23. Robert Wraight, “Seven Gloops to Sanity,” Tatler, July 10, 1963. 24. Dennis Crompton, interview with the author, January 9, 2014. 25. See Crompton, “City Synthesis,” Living City 2 (June 1963): 86. Crompton described the model in the following terms: “The complex functioning of the city is integrated by its natural computer mechanism. This mechanism is at once digital and biological, producing rational and random actions, reactions and counter-­reactions.” The promise of the computer to resolve complex urban planning problems was stressed at the same moment in the Eameses’ 1964 multiscreen film Think, projected in the Saarinen Associates IBM pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. 26. Crompton, interview. 27. Crompton, interview. 28. See also “A Phantasmagoria of City Impressions,” Building Industry News, June 27, 1963, 10. 29. As Bernhard Siegert has proposed, the logic of electronic circuits fundamentally troubles the inside and outside distinction traditionally associated with doors. Regarding the notion of the electronic gate, he writes, “The basic distinction of inside and outside has been replaced by the distinction between current/no current, on/off. The cybernetic logic of opening and closure estranges the old nomological logic” (Siegert, “Door Logic, or, the Materiality of the Symbolic,” in Cultural Techniques, 203). 30. See, for instance, the numerous references in the project descriptions from Plug-­In City to Instant City in Peter Cook, Archigram (London: Studio Vista, 1972). 31. Cook, Archigram, 74. 32. Peter Cook, “What of the Future?,” in Decorative Art and Modern Interiors (London: Studio Vista, 1966), 6. 33. Ibid. Advanced design thinking, he stressed, trended toward the “complete elimination” of furniture. The need to sit or to sleep might be handled by the floor, which could be recessed into a comfortable pit or pushed up into a softened “lay-­down.” The rounded-­corner opening in the wall seen in photographs of the installation at Woolands may have appeared screen-­like, but Cook’s description reveals that it was an opening for a paternoster-­type “silo” that transported everything from an “ice-­cream to a dress-­suit.” 34. Ibid. 324 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

35. Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo,” in Design by Choice, edited by Penny Sparkle (London: Academy Editions, 1981), 108–­14. 36. Banham, “Great Gizmo.” The media tower was described in the promotional material as something to “house and beam out all canned, projected, and controlled entertainment (film, tape, gram., etc).” 37. Michael Webb, “The Ultimate in Drive-­in Living,” Architectural Design, November 1966, 576. 38. Peter Cook, “Control and Choice,” in Archigram, 68. 39. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 68. Two physical prototypes were constructed for the exhibit, combining carousel slide projectors with movable screens controlled by repurposed actuators of the type used to control the aileron on airplane wings (Crompton, interview). 40. Exhibition poster, Beyond Architecture, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 1967. 41. Peter Cook, “Milan Triennale,” in Archigram, 83. 42. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 68. The carcass metaphor, which likened support to the bones of a skeleton, drew on a long-­standing architectural trope, which can be traced back at least to Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (esp. book 3). For an overview and analysis, see Adrian Forty, “Structure,” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 276–­85. 43. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 68. 44. The structural “carcass” was conceived along lines first established in Michael Webb’s Drive-­In Housing (1966), a system in which small vehicles plugged into hydraulic lifting mechanisms, which, when combined together, folded out into rooms to create a temporary dwelling. 45. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 71. 46. Peter Cook, “Hard/Soft,” Archigram 8 (1968), n.p. 47. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 68. 48. Dennis Crompton, “Architecture and Media: The Flip Point,” Interior Design, November 1967, 6. 49. Crompton, “Architecture and Media,” 7. 50. Crompton, “Architecture and Media,” 6. 51. Latimer had contributed designs to Britain Can Make It during the war and came to international attention when the storage units he designed with Robin Day won first prize in MoMA’s International Competition for the Design of Low Cost Furniture in 1948 (MoMA press release, 490113–­5). 52. The group also included Ken Hughes as technical assistant and Clive Webster as audio and electronic systems consultant. 53. On the general relationship of educational reform in Britain, and its relationship to the curriculum at Hornsey, see Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008). 54. Clive Latimer, “Light/Sound Workshop,” Studio International, April 1967, 200. 55. Clive Latimer, “Environmental Kinetics,” Interior Design, November 1967, 8–­9. 56. Latimer, “Environmental Kinetics,” 9. 57. “Unit One,” in K4—­Kinetic Audio Visual Environments, exh. cat. (Brighton, 1967). 325 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

58. Dennis Crompton, interview with the author, March 31, 2016. 59. Clive Latimer, “K4,” typescript, February 1967, Tony Rickaby Collection, London. 60. Latimer, “K4.” See also Peter Cook, “Instant City,” in Archigram, 87. 61. Latimer, “K4.” 62. Latimer, “K4.” 63. Latimer, “K4.” 64. Roughly three minutes of footage exists in the Archigram Archives, London. I am grateful to Dennis Crompton for digitizing the footage and making it available. A few seconds of footage of the Labyrinth and Arena sections appear in the short film made by the Brighton College of Art Student Film Society, Brighton 67. 65. K4—Kinetic Audio Visual Environments. 66. These were likely the “Ultra Stellar Scanner” performance by Bowstead, Salisbury, and Sutherland. The “total effect” of these overlaid, rapid-­sequence projections was described in the event’s program as “a fantastic space panorama, seen as though on the giant video-­screen of a space control center of the future” (K4—Kinetic Audio Visual Environments). 67. Light/Sound Workshop poster, Brighton, 1967. 68. Light/Sound Workshop poster. 69. Wigley, “Network Fever,” 111. 70. Peter Cook, “A Series of Paradoxes,” Control 3 (1967), n.p. 71. The indication of human presence remains ambiguous in the variations that survive. In the most elaborate version, a photograph of a figure with his back to the viewer was placed at the hinge point between the two projection systems. In the version published in Control, this figure and the colors films are eliminated, but several diminutive scale figures roam between plug-­in points of the axonometric. The drawing included in Archigram’s 1972 monograph scrubbed all traces of human presence. 72. A period definition can be found in Thomas F. Walton, “Engineering Drawings and Data Lists,” in Technical Data Requirements for Systems Engineering and Support (Englewood Hills, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1965), 170. 73. See Yve-­Alain Bois, “Metamorphosis of Axonometry,” Daidalos 1 (September 1981): 41–­58; and Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 160–­81. 74. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 68. 75. The invocation of the dispositive in this manner draws on the work of Francesco Casetti. In contrast to the notion of an apparatus determining cinematic experience, he has proposed the dispositive as a concept for the historically variable assemblage of the basic elements that constitute cinematic experiences. See Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 67–­98. 76. Cook, “Control and Choice,” 70. 77. Sadler has described the group’s belief in a more decentralized and mixed economic model than that of the dominant welfare state as an ideology of “pop liberalism.” Such pop liberalism was not purely laissez-­faire, but still hoped to 326 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

“divert market mechanisms and the military-­industrial complex to the benefit of social progress” (Sadler, Archigram, 47). 78. Warren Chalk provided the clearest account of housing assembled from an “interchangeable kit of parts.” The text closely echoed Banham’s notion of clip-­on architecture. See “Housing as a Consumer Product,” Arena 81, no. 900 (1966): 228–­30. 79. Archigram 8 (1968), n.p.. The issue was produced on the occasion of the fourteenth Milan Triennale as a pendant to the pneumatic Milanogram exhibition at that year’s Triennale. 80. “Emancipation,” Archigram 8 (1968), n.p.. 81. Ibid. 82. See Mark Crinson, “The Triumph of the Paradigm,” Architecture—­Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994). 83. Crompton and Chalk had studied at Manchester University, and Cook at the Bournemouth College of Art, followed by the Architectural Association. Greene studied at Nottingham University; Herron at the Brixton Building School before transferring to the Regent Street Polytechnic, where Webb also studied. 84. Banham, Megastructure, 100. “They raided the illustrations and advertisements of color magazines and came up, inevitably, with ‘leisure people’ because color magazines in those affluent years contained little else.” As Nigel Whiteley has noted, this is Banham at his least convincing. See Whiteley, Reyner Banham, 176–­77. 85. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; repr. New York, Knopf, 1952). Beauvoir’s analysis has itself been critiqued and recast by later analyses. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Doreen Massey, Space, Place, Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 86. Rickaby subsequently worked closely with Archigram on several projects, including the screen-­filled inflatable deployed at the 1968 Milan Triennale, the 1969 competition for the Entertainment Center in Monaco, and on the journal’s ninth issue. See Archigram 8 and Archigram 9 for contributions by Rickaby. 87. Tony Rickaby, interview with the author, May 29, 2014. 88. Rickaby, interview. 89. John Bowstead and Dennis Crompton, “Light/Sound Research—­Report to the Research and Development Committee, Royal College of Art,” November 6, 1968, Archigram Archives. 90. Bowstead and Crompton, “Light/Sound Research.” The research was carried out between November 1967 and June 1968. 91. Bowstead and Crompton, “Light/Sound Research.” 92. Bowstead and Crompton, “Light/Sound Research.” 93. Crompton and Bowstead could well have been aware of the “Sample Lesson,” as it had recently been published, together with a larger overview of the Eameses’ work with multi-­image, multimedia display in a special issue of Architectural Design edited by Geoffrey Holroyd from 1966. See Architectural Design, September 1966, 432–­71. 327 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

94. Archigram’s appeal to emancipation as an enhanced capacity to choose and manipulate environmental media, like that of many other groups from this period, relied on the distinction between activation and passivity that recent accounts of participation have challenged. Particularly influential has been Jacques Rancière’s critique of both the Brechtian concept of activation as criti­ cal distancing and its opposite, the Artaudian notion of activation as intensified sensory and bodily involvement. See Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009). An earlier version was published in Artforum, March 2007, 270–­80. 95. The argument that a “retraining of the sensorium” was central to the development of nineteenth-­century optical media, asserted by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, has been critically excavated by Crary, in Techniques of the Observer, 112–36. 96. On theorization of immaterial labor, see Maurizzio Lazarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132–­47; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 280–­303. 97. In solidarity with striking students in Paris and at other art colleges in the UK, the occupation was not solely about plans to amalgamate the arts college into the polytechnic but included a more substantial critique of the division between advanced design training and more routine studies geared to supply the labor market with technical workers. See the original documents in Association of Members of Hornsey College of Art, The Hornsey Affair (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1969); and Tickner, Hornsey 1968. 98. Dennis Crompton, interview with the author, May 28, 2014. See also, Peter Laurie and Roger Law, “What Really Happened at Hornsey,” The Sunday Times (London), September 13, 1970. 99. Peter Cook, “Ideas Circus,” in Archigram, 100. 100. Cook, “Ideas Circus.” 101. Cedric Price, guest ed., Architectural Design, special issue, “Learning,” May 1968, 206–­42. 102. Cedric Price, “National Schools Plan,” Architect’s Journal 143, no. 18 (May 4, 1966): 1282–­84. The vision of decentralization was also central to Price’s Pot­ teries Thinkbelt project. See “Potteries Thinkbelt,” Architectural Design, October 1966, 483–­97. On the genesis of the project, see Stanley Mathews, From Agit-­ Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 192–­239. 103. As Irene Sunwoo has pointed out, the importance of audiovisual networks was widespread in discussions of educational reform in the 1960s. Britain’s Labour government began investing in audiovisual systems to support what came to be termed “distance education” in the early 1960s. These ultimately manifested themselves in the creation of the Open University in 1969. See Sunwoo, “Pedagogy’s Progress: Alvin Boyarsky’s International Institute of Design,” Grey Room 34 (Winter 2009): 28–­57.

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104. Price disparagingly reproduced the OED definition of education in his own essay on learning in the issue’s introduction. See Price, “Learning,” 206. 105. As a “university of the streets,” the project’s explicit aim was to break down the barriers between education and more informal types of learning, connected to play and leisure. These ideas are outlined in Littlewood, “A Laboratory of Fun,” New Scientist 22, no. 391 (May 14, 1964): 432–­33; Cedric Price, “The Fun Palace,” Architectural Review 815 (January 1965): 74–­75. For more on the Fun Palace, see Mathews, From Agit-­Prop to Free Space; and Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cyber­ netic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 119–­40. 106. Cedric Price, “Atom,” Architectural Design, May 1968, 232–­35. 107. See “Ideas Circus,” Archigram 8 (1968); and “Ideas Circus,” Architectural Design, May 1968, 236. While the Ideas Circus was never realized as projected, the idea of a vehicle equipped with audiovisual technologies traveling between schools of architecture endured into the 1970s, eventually manifesting itself in the form of the Polyark Bus, which emerged from the North London Polytechnic and was further supported by Price and Murray at Architectural Design magazine. See Murray, “AD/AA/Polyark Bus Tour,” Architectural Design 43 (April 1973): 201–­12. 108. Archigram, “Instant City Primer,” Architectural Design, May 1969, 277. 109. Archigram, “Instant City Primer,” Architectural Design, 278. 110. Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” Architectural Design, November 1970, 568. Archigram worked with an airship enthusiast, Max Reinish, and AA students Tom Donnelly and Stuart MacKenzie to create the scale model of the Instant City airship used in the photomontages. 111. Archigram, “Instant City in Progress.” 112. An interest in the project’s montages led to an invitation from the curator Harald Szeeman to design “event structures” for the fifth Documenta in 1972. See Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” 571–­73. Eight of the group’s Instant City montages had been reproduced in the catalog for Kynaston McShine’s 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art. See McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970). 113. The use of photographic cutouts to denote media screens appears in a range of drawings for Instant City and in the Soft Scene Monitor project, both of which began in 1968. As the drawings are undated, the exact chronology is hard to pinpoint. 114. The idea of using cinematic projections to define a building’s exterior had appeared within Russian constructivism in the 1920s in Alexander and Victor Vesnin’s competition entry for the headquarters of the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper (1924), yet they did not use photomontage to envision these surfaces. On Nitzchke, see Joseph Abram, “Oscar Nitzchke,” AMC 6 (December 1984): 66–­95; and Gus Dudley, ed., Oscar Nitzchke, Architect (New York: Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, 1985). 115. Herron, “Drawings of Archigram.”

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116. The “archigram operas” were multiscreen, audio-­visual presentations with slides, films, live drawing, and soundtrack. They were organized in response to invitations to speak at different colleges in the United Kingdom and in Europe. See Archigram Archival Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac .uk. For an account, see Martin Pawley, “We Will Not Bulldoze Westminster Abbey: Archigram and the Retreat from Technology” (1976), in The Opposi­ tions Reader, edited by Kevin Lippert (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 425–­36. 117. Hadas Steiner notes that the project was “advanced primarily through the media of photomontage into which orthographic projections were injected” (Beyond Archigram, 209). 118. Quoted in Reyner Banham, “Monaco Underground,” Architects’ Journal, September 2, 1970. Reprinted in Dennis Crompton, ed., A Guide to Archigram (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 272. 119. Peter Cook, “Features Monte Carlo,” in Archigram, 106. 120. Cook, “Features Monte Carlo,” 106. 121. Cook, “Features Monte Carlo,” 106. 122. Herron, “Drawings of Archigram.” With Monte Carlo, he continued, sequence drawings “depicted an environment in change through a process of unveiling . . . where plans, sections and perspectives of the activity space are shown using base drawings, with a range of events overlaid, to demonstrate change and the responsive environment.” 123. Raymond Williams proposed the notion of televisual flow as central to the difference between cinema and television as cultural forms in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 77–­120. Archigram’s interest in feeding television signals back into the space of their recording goes beyond notions of flow as a characteristic of programming and echoes notions of topology. In the magazine Radical Software and in the writings of an artist such as Dan Graham and during the later 1960s and early 1970s, conceptions of topology were used to theorize the radically different spatiotemporal and intersubjective dynamics of video feedback. On the subject of topology in early video art see, David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); as well as Paul Ryan, Felicity Scott, and Mark Wasiuta, “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare Revisited: From Klein Worms to Relational Circuits,” Grey Room 44 (Summer 2011): 114–33. Eric de Bruyn has suggested the centrality of topological metaphors to postminimalist art more broadly. See de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-­Minimalism,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 32–­63. 124. Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” 570. 125. See Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” 570; and Cook, Experimental Architecture, 133–­34. 126. Cook, Experimental Architecture, 136. 127. See, for instance, Sadler, Archigram, 129. 128. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 13.

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129. Hunter began his career at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and subsequently directed the Bath Festival, before coming to Brighton. Hunter’s conception, remi­ niscent of the horizontalized model of Alloway’s cultural continuum, looked to place the “serious” and the “apparently flippant” side by side. See Ian Hunter, introduction to the 1968 festival program, http://www.brightonfestival.org. 130. For a typical instance, see Venturi and Scott Brown’s comments in Learning from Las Vegas, 102. 131. Despite the considerable technical expertise in the group, nowhere in the numerous drawings, models, and documents for Instant City does one find any detailed specifications of the projectors, screens, portable amplifiers, and control circuits that would make the project run. Banham noted the struggle this created for Archigram in his report on the Monte Carlo competition. After winning the competition, the group had to convince the client to support a technical study of the electronic audiovisual systems with the same level of detail and funding as that accorded to the structure of the building. See Banham, “Monaco Underground,” 272. 132. The speculative nature of the project equally avoided any discussion of how Instant City might be paid for. The research for the project was supported philanthropically, via the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. 133. Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” 566. 134. The affection for the provinces had a biographical dimension as well, as more than half of the group hailed from places such as Southend-­on-­Sea, Blackpool, and Nottingham. In this description, with its emphasis on “reversal,” one may be hearing an echo of McLuhan’s insistence that electronic space would “reverse” the fragmentation of the mechanical age, resulting in a condition in which the hierarchy between periphery and center would be undone. 135. The increasing role played by knowledge, information, and communication within the economy, which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have dubbed “informatization of production,” has drastically increased the hegemony of global cities like London. See Hardt and Negri, “Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production,” in Empire, 280–­303; and Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

3. EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE 1. Hollein would retrospectively cite the awareness of these projects as reference points for his own emerging practice. See Hollein, “A Comment from Hans Hollein,” in Archigram, edited by Peter Cook (London: Studio Vista, 1972), 6. 2. Friedrich Achleitner, “Entwicklung und Situation der österreichischen Archi­ tektur seit 1945,” Bauen + Wohnen 19 (September 1965): 339–­445. 3. Achleitner, “Notizen zur Geschichte einer neuen Strömung,” Bauen + Wohnen 19 (September 1965): 371–­73. Along with Hollein’s work, Achleitner also featured a project by Wilhelm Holzbauer for a diagonally braced office building festooned with helicopter landing pads, and a project for a church by Pichler.

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4. Achleitner, “Notizen,” 371. Achleitner writes: “Es gehört zum Wesen der Montage, dass sich durch die Herstellung ungewohnter Beziehungen nicht nur etwas Neues ergibt, sondern dass sich die Dinge (oder Worte) selbst verwandeln.” 5. For German-­speaking intellectuals, an inescapable association would have been Franz Kafka’s short story Die Verwandlung (1917). Originating from the German Wandel (change), the substantive Verwandlung also carries more archaic links to words like Bewegung (movement, action) and Verkehr (transit, communication), linking transformation to movement, association and displacement. See Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 16 (Leipzig, Germany: S. Hirzel, 1854–­1960). 6. Whether Achleitner, a generation older than Hollein, might have suggested the rubric of transformation to Hollein, or the other way around, remains unclear (Hans Hollein, interview with the author, July 25, 2007). Hollein referred to the larger series of montages as Transformations in his correspondence with MoMA in 1966 (Hollein, letter to Stephen Kurtz, December 30, 1966, MoMA, Department of Architecture and Design Correspondence files). When the montages were first published in America, Hollein chose to excerpt and reprint this passage on montage and Verwandlung from Achleitner’s article. See Hollein, “Transformations,” Arts and Architecture 83, no. 4 (1966): 24–­25. The idea of transformation held an enduring appeal for Hollein, becoming the theme of the exhibition he organized for the inauguration of the Cooper-­Hewitt Museum. See ManTransforms: An International Exhibition on Aspects of Design, exh. cat. (New York: Cooper-­Hewitt Museum, 1976). 7. See Hollein, letter to Stephen Kurtz. 8. For an overview, see Waverly Lowell, Elizabeth Byrne, and Betsy Friedrich-­ Rothwell, eds., Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903–­2003 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 9. Hans Hollein, interview with the author, July 25, 2007. 10. Hans Hollein, “Plastic Space” (master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1960). Joseph Esherick and James Prestini supervised the thesis. 11. Hollein, “Plastic Space,” 9. 12. Hollein used the term “Thing,” yet Gebilde’s translations can include formation, structure, pattern, creation, and creature (Plastic Space, 38). 13. Gebilde had a wider association in the work of Friedrich Hayek, a Vienna school economist, of which Hollein may also have been aware. Hayek called on the geological associations of the term during these years to describe “social formations” that were not formal institutions. See The Counter-­Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 83. 14. Hans Hollein, interview with the author, August 18, 2006. 15. Hans Hollein, “Notebook: June 1959–­June 1960,” Hollein Private Archive, Vienna. Hollein’s work was later supported by figures who had supported Kiesler’s work, notably André Bloc, who promoted a “plastic” fusion of sculpture and architecture in the pages of Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture. See, for instance, “Hans Hollein et Walter Pichler,” Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture 53 (May–­June 1966): 54–­67.

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16. Hollein traveled to Los Angeles just as Esther McCoy published her pioneering Five California Architects in 1960. See Hans Hollein, “R. M. Schindler,” Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Stadtebau 4 (1966): 67–­82; Hollein, “Rudolph  M. Schindler: ein Wiener Architekt in Kalifornien,” Aufbau 16, no. 3 (1961): 102–­4. According to Hollein, he met J. B. Bakema in Los Angeles in 1960 and spent several days driving him around to see the Schindler houses. See Bakema, “Schindler’s spel met de ruimte,” Forum 16, no. 8 (1961): 253–­63. 17. Hans Hollein, interview with the author, August 18, 2006. A failure of historical transmission was also underscored in my interviews with Günther Feuerstein. 18. For useful, and contrasting, overviews on the period, see Eeva-­Liisa Pelkonen, Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); and Johannes Porsch, ed., The Austrian Phenomenon/ Architektur Avantgarde Oesterreich 1956–­1973 (Vienna: Architekturzentrum Wien, 2009). 19. See Friedrich Achleitner, “Motifs and Motivations, Background and Influences, Therapeutic Nihilism,” Austrian New Wave (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1980), 2–­23; Dietmar Steiner, “Roland Rainer und Wien,” in Roland Rainer: Arbeiten aus 65 Jahren (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1990), 9–­11; Rainer, Planungskonzept Wien (Vienna: Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1962). 20. Working in Turkey at the time, Holzmeister remained there until the late 1940s. Other students of Holzmeister included Achleitner, Wilhelm Holz­bauer, Viktor Hufnagel, Friedrich Kurrent, Gustav Peichl, and Johannes Spalt. See Maria Welzig and Gerhard Steixner, Die Architektur und ich: Eine ­Bilanz der Öster­reichischen Architektur seit 1945 vermittelt durch ihre Protagonisten (Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 2003), 9–­10; and Achleitner, “Motifs and Motivations,” 14. 21. Hans Hollein, “Neue Konzeptionen aus Wien; Fragmentarische Anmerkungen eines Beteiligen,” Bau 2–­3 (1969): 15. 22. For more on the Wiener Gruppe, see Peter Weibel, ed., Die Wiener Gruppe: Ein Moment der Moderne 1954–­1960 (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1997). 23. Pichler relates that he and Hollein remained distinct from the Wiener Gruppe and were given the nickname “The English Fleet” because of a perceived preference for English-­style tailoring, a detail that calls to mind the sartorial obsessions of Adolf Loos. It may also have referenced Hollein and Pichler’s interest in the Anglo-­Saxon world, as both had traveled extensively in the United States and had developed contacts in the United Kingdom. See Sabine Breitwieser, “A Conversation with Walter Pichler,” in Pichler: Prototypen/Prototypes 1966–­69 (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1998), 27–­34. 24. Both manifestos were delivered at Situation-­Konfrontation: Internationale Kunstgespräch, an event in 1958 bringing Austrian architects, poets, painters, and critics together with intellectuals, critics, and artists from France and Germany. The event was organized by Otto Mauer, a Catholic monsignor, who had founded the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna four years previously. See Robert Fleck, Avantgarde in Wien: Die Geschichte der Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Wien, 1954–­1982 (Vienna: Locker, 1982). 25. Spur 5 (Spezialnummer über der unitären Urbanismus) (June 1961).

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26. Hans Hollein, “Zuruck zur Architektur” (lecture, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, February 1, 1962). Reprinted in Peter Weibel, ed. Hans Hollein (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 46–48. 27. Hollein dates the shift to photographic montage to 1962–­63. See Hans Hollein, letter to Museum of Modern Art, December 30, 1966, Department of Architecture and Design Correspondence Files, MoMA Archives. 28. Information on the subtitle conveyed by Alfons Schilling, interview with the author, January 16, 2009. A collection of tearsheets and photographs, together with a fragmentary sense of the layout is preserved in Schilling’s archive. Several individual tear sheets from this collection are reproduced in Georg Schöllhammer, “The Bolted Gesture,” in Pichler, 47–­57. 29. The dome project made its public appearance as a part of Fuller’s exhibition at MoMA in October 1959, in the form of a geodesic structure overlaid on a zenithal aerial photograph of Manhattan. The perspectival photomontage was made using an airbrush and was reproduced in the New Scientist in February 1962. For a brilliant archaeology of these images, see Mark Wigley, “Planetary Homeboy,” in Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 221–­35. 30. Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, Architektur: Work in Progress (Vienna: Galerie nächst St. Stephan, 1963), n.p. 31. Joseph Esherick, introduction to Architektur, n.p. 32. See, for instance, Aldo van Eyck, “Architecture of the Dogon,” Architectural Forum 115, no. 3 (1961) and “Dogon: Mand–­Huis–­Dorp–­Wereld,” Forum 17, no. 4 (1967). Utzon’s interest in the pre-­Columbian architecture of Mexico appears in Jørn Utzon, “Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect,” Zodiac 10 (1962): 113–­41. On van Eyck and Haan’s interest in Dogon societies, see Karin Jaschke, “Mythical Journeys: Ethnography, Archaeology, and the Attraction of Tribal Cultures in the Work of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012). 33. Hollein, “Architektur,” Architektur. 34. Hans Hollein, interview with the author, August 18, 2006. 35. Foreseeing the necessity of such planning, Morgenstern argued, populations would “gradually become accustomed to forms of existence that would otherwise be hard to bear” (The Question of National Defense [New York: Random House, 1959], 110). 36. Six Flaktürme were constructed in Vienna as part of the Nazi war effort. With concrete walls up to five meters thick, the towers were designed to house antiaircraft artillery but also functioned as temporary shelters for military and for civilian populations during the war. Given their enormous mass, demolition after the war was considered unfeasible. 37. Hollein had been in contact with Drexler as early as 1960, sending him a copy of his Berkeley thesis (Hans Hollein letter, October 10, 1960, MoMA, Department of Architecture and Design, Correspondence Files). Pichler would be in contact in 1963, during a visit to New York. Drexler and Philip Johnson purchased several of their works for the MoMA collection in 1967 just prior to the exhibition. See MoMA, Architectural Drawings Collection, Worksheet, 436.67. 334 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

38. As I showed in the first chapter, such a reassessment was central to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Alan Colquhoun’s review of Banham’s book argued that he had simplified the degree to which problems of technology within architecture could be divided between literal and symbolic aspects. See Colquhoun, “The Modern Movement in Architecture,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2, no. 1 (Janu­ary 1962): 59–­62; and Colquhoun, “Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology,” Architectural Design, November 1962, 508–­9. 39. Drexler, Twentieth Century Engineering (New York: MoMA, 1964), 4. See Walter Gropius, “Die Entwicklung Moderner Industriebaukunst,” in Jahrbuch des Deutchen Werkbundes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913), 17–­22. 40. Drexler, Twentieth Century Engineering, 6. 41. Kepes, New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Theobald, 1956), 260. 42. Kepes, New Landscape, 252. 43. Kepes, New Landscape, 260. Reinhold Martin has persuasively analyzed Kepes’s visual rhetoric in terms of a cybernetically informed “pattern seeing” broadly deployed within corporate architecture during the 1950s and 1960s. See Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 42–­79. 44. See, in particular, Günther Feuerstein and Hans Hollein, “Technik,” Bau 2 (1965): 41–­54. Following their criticisms of the editorship of Der Bau, the maga­ zine published by the Zentralvereinigung der Architekten Österreichs, it was decided that Hollein, Feuerstein, Gustav Peichl, and Sokratis Dimitriou would be made editors, with Pichler taking responsibility for graphic design. The renamed journal—­Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau—­lasted until 1970. 45. Hollein, “Technik,” Bau 2 (1965): 40–52. 46. Hollein, “Technik,” 31. 47. Several versions of the Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape montage were developed beginning in 1964, using images of both the USS Enterprise and the USS Forrestal. 48. “Visionary Architecture,” MoMA Press Release no. 108, September 29, 1960. 49. Arthur Drexler, wall text for “Visionary Architecture,” quoted in Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 27. 50. An early review of the exhibition, titled Macrostructures, was penned by a young Dan Graham. See “Models and Monuments: The Plague of Architecture,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 5 (1967): 32. For a reading of Hollein’s relation to Oldenburg, see “Blow Up,” in Dominique Rouillard, Superarchitecture: Le futur de l’architecture 1950–­1970 (Paris: Editions de la Villette, 2004), 191–­202. According to Hollein, the exhibition at Feigen was the first time the two artists became aware of each other’s work. An extensive interview with Oldenburg was published in Bau later that year. 51. “IDEA: International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture,” Architectural Design, June 1966, 312. 52. MoMA Archives, Correspondence, Exhibition Files, #836. 53. Arthur Drexler, Transcription follows Drexler’s hand-­annotations, Typescript, MoMA Archive, Exhibition Files, #836. 335 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

54. Letter from Ludwig Gläser to Arthur Drexler, July 5, 1967, Correspondence, MoMA Archive, Exhibition Files, #836. 55. Tamms, working as a part of the German Todt Organization during World War  II, designed a total of eight antiaircraft towers for Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna. The Nazi legacy of the structures was nowhere mentioned in the exhibition text. In a perceptive review, the critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted the way in which reality had outstripped fantasy. See “When Life Is Stranger Than Art,” New York Times, July 30, 1967. “Today even before the ink on the vision is dry, imagination has been outrun by technology, which is prepared to execute anything the mind can conceive. Reality passes fantasy’s most ambitious visions.” 56. Cinemascope conjoined multiple projections using anamorphic lenses, creating a screen image twice as wide as conventional 35 mm film. Whereas the aspect ratio of Cinemascope was 2:66:1, the largest image of the Aircraft Carrier series was roughly 5:1. On the history of Cinemascope and other widescreen formats, see John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 57. Hollein, Letter, December 30, 1966, MoMA, Department of Architecture and Design Correspondence files. 58. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 20. The emphasis on silhouette rather than technical prowess was a bit unexpected, given Banham’s own fascination with technology. It was arguably the formal and programmatic complexity of the latter that interested Hollein. An analysis of the USS Forrestal, along with a very preliminary sketch for the Aircraft Carrier series and several images of life on board the USS Forrestal, appear in Hollein, “Städte: Brennpunkte des Leben,” Der Aufbau 3–4 (April 1963): 116. 59. The detail was recalled by Erich Pedevilla, Hollein’s longtime associate (Pede­ villa, interview with the author, October 18, 2016). 60. See, for instance, Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1964). In 1963–­64 Hollein was a visiting professor at Washington University, where Maki also taught. 61. The awareness of such marginality and of disappearing forms of rural life was also present in the work of Raimund Abraham, whose book Elementare Archi­ tektur (1964) provided a detailed photographic study of stone construction techniques found in remote Austrian villages. Abraham published the study just as he began to work on his better-­known series of montages devoted to vast urban machines. On the significance of Austria’s marginality in cultural and political terms, see Anton Pelinka, Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 62. The role of technological shifts in changing perceptions of the landscape was a broader concern during these years. It was also in 1964 that Leo Marx would influentially argue that technological disruptions, from trains to cars and noisy farm equipment were fully a part of the pastoral genre of American writing. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

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63. Robin Evans has emphasized the importance of Pliny’s myth of the origin of drawing in terms of the difference between practices of drawing in architecture and those in art. See “Translations from Drawing to Building,” AA Files 12 (Summer 1986), reprinted in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association Press, 1997), 153–­94. 64. The first effort to make a comprehensive catalog of silhouettes of military and cargo ships for identification at sea was published by John F. T. Jane as All the World’s Fighting Ships in 1898. Expanded through the early twentieth century into a series of military publications, Jane’s information group continues to exist as the world’s largest commercial intelligence firm. 65. The montage visually condenses Le Corbusier’s disparagement of architects and praise of engineers. Whereas the former, he wrote, “live within the narrow confines of what they learned in school,” the “builders of liners, bold and masterful, realize palaces beside which cathedrals are tiny things, and they cast them on the waters!” (Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture [Paris: Crès, 1925]; translated as Toward an Architecture, translated by John Goodman [Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2007], 149). 66. Le Corbusier, Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. (Boulogne, France: Éditions de l’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1938). 67. Alexandre Persitz, “Petit panorama d’equivalences insolites,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 87 (December 1959–­January 1960). 68. See, for instance, “The Mighty Enterprise,” National Geographic, March 1963, 431–­48. Images cut from this article were used by Hollein in “Städte: Brenn­ punkte des Leben.” 69. Hollein, “Zukunft der Architektur,” Bau 1 (1965): 9. 70. See Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 71. Hollein, “Zukunft der Architektur, 11. 72. Hollein, “Kerzengeschaft RETTI, Wien,” Bau 3 (1966): 39–­44. 73. Hollein, “Kerzengeschaft RETTI.” 74. As Mark Wigley has argued about such traditions of total design, the dream of a fully designed coherence was not only about the completeness of an aesthetic conception but also about a latent desire for control, which operated simultaneously through an “implosive” turn inward and an explosive extension outward. See Mark Wigley, “Whatever Happened to Total Design,” Harvard Design Magazine 5 (Summer 1998): 18. 75. For an account stressing the importance of irony for understanding Hollein’s work, see Joseph Rykwert, “Irony: Hollein’s General Approach,” special issue, Architecture and Urbanism 2 (February 1985): 194–­96. 76. Hans Hollein, “Vorstoß und Rückstoß,” Bau 4 (1966): 65. 77. Hollein, “Vorstoß und Rückstoß,” 65. 78. In addition to “Vorstoß und Rückstoß,” see “Neue Medien der Architektur: Fragmentarische Anmerkungen zu neuen Entwicklungen und Möglichkeiten,” Wort und Wahrheit 23, no. 2 (March–­April 1968): 174–­76. Though published in 1968, the text is dated 1967. The years were the height of McLuhan’s popularity,

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which was fueled by magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy, and by cheap pocket editions of his books, published by Signet. In 1967 the Architectural Record noted that nearly “every architect who came into the office had the paperback edition of McLuhan’s Understanding Media tucked into an overcoat pocket, or nestling among the model photos in his briefcase” (Architectural Record, March 1967, 151–­52). 79. Hollein, “Vorstoß und Rückstoß,” 65. 80. The spatial dimension of McLuhan’s media theory was developed in direct correspondence not only with Mumford and Giedion but also with Jacqueline Tyrwitt, Constantinos Doxiadis, and Buckminster Fuller. Indeed, McLuhan’s explosive-­implosive reading of media shares many of the features of Mumford’s reading of “etherialization.” The concept was first put forward by the historian Arnold Toynbee, to describe the processes of simplification, refinement, and dematerialization characterizing successful technological development. For an account of the relationship between McLuhan and the theory of networks in the magazine Ekistics, see Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (2001): 82–­122; see also Michael Darroch, “Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951–­1957,” Canadian Journal of Communication 33 (2008): 147–­69; and Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). On the relation between Giedion and McLuhan, see Reto Geiser, Giedion in Between: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Transatlantic Exchange, 1938–­1968 (PhD diss., ETH Zurich, 2010). 81. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 94–­107. 82. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 93. 83. Images of iconic landscapes were used for some of the first transatlantic Telstar broadcasts, providing a familiar reference against which the shifting low-­resolution electronic medium could be deciphered. According to a description of one of the first broadcasts in Neues Österreich (July 24, 1962), these included the Golden Gate Bridge and Mount Rushmore. See “Belonging to a Never-­Never Land? Television and Consumer Modernity in Postwar Austria,” in The ­Americanization/ Westernization of Austria, edited by Anton Pelinka and Günter Bischof (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 114. 84. Hollein invited Johansen—­together with Philip Johnson and Joseph Esherick—­ ­to Vienna in 1965 to exhibit their work. He also featured Johansen’s projects in the pages of Bau. See “Background USA,” Bau 5–­6 (1965). 85. John Johansen, “An Architecture for the Electronic Age,” American Scholar 35, no. 3 (Summer 1966): 461–­71. 86. Johansen, “Architecture for the Electronic Age,” 467. 87. Hans Hollein, “Alles ist Architektur,” Bau 1–­2 (1968): 2; translated as “Everything Is Architecture,” in Architecture Culture: 1943–­1968: A Documentary Anthology, edited by Joan Ockman and Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 238. 88. Hollein, interview with the author, August 18, 2006. 89. See Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956), in On Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115–­32. 338 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

90. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” 123. 91. There are considerable parallels between the serial montage used in “Alles ist Architektur” and contemporaneous graphic design strategies used in the cheap mass-­ market pocket books that Quentin Fiore designed with Marshall McLuhan, such as The Medium Is the Massage (1967), and War and Peace in the Global Village (1967). Here the effort was to envision the space of electronic media within the medium of print. McLuhan termed these publications “non-­ books.” Fiore developed a number of graphic devices to convey McLuhan’s arguments about vision. Conceived as a single sequence, the montage layout broke down the hierarchy of text over image by processing images in readerly sequences. Conversely, text became image-­like; letters were grossly enlarged, emphasizing visual characteristics over and against syntactical relations. On Fiore’s books, see Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (New York: Phaidon, 1996), 91–­102; and Jeffrey  T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/ Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). 92. Hollein, “Alles ist Architektur,” 2. My translation differs slightly from the version in Ockman, which renders Wirkung as affect. 93. In 1969, Bau would lay claim to another “found architect,” devoting a landmark issue to Ludwig Wittgenstein and publishing the permit documents that veri­ fied Wittgenstein’s shared authorship, with Paul Engelmann, of the house at Vienna’s Kundmangasse 19. The issue was also intended to intervene in the planned demolition of the house. Wittgenstein was still not widely recognized at the time as the architect of the house. 94. Liane Lefaivre reads this as a process of “learning from objects,” akin to Venturi and Scott Brown’s efforts to learn from pop art during the late 1960s. See Lefaivre, “Everything Is Architecture: Multiple Hans Hollein and the Art of Crossing Over,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 18 (Spring 2003): 68. 95. The image of Svobodair was quickly appropriated as an emblem for a younger generation. Hollein, Archigram, Cedric Price, Utopie, and Paolo Soleri appeared to emerge from the can as a kind of aerosol blast on the title page of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui’s September 1968 issue. See L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 39, no. 139 (1968): 1. 96. Bau 3 (1968). 97. Hollein, “Editorial,” Bau 1–­2 (1968): 1. 98. Hollein, “Everything Is Architecture,” 238. 99. Hollein, “Everything Is Architecture,” 239. 100. Harmon and Knowlton, engineers at Bell Labs, were pioneers in the field of computer-­generated images. See Jasia Reichardt, The Computer in Art (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971). 101. Hollein, “Everything Is Architecture,” 239. 102. Hollein described the telephone booth as a “building of minimal size extended into global dimensions” (“Alles ist Architektur,” 2). 103. Ramparts was known for its New Left politics in the context of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, indicating that Hollein and Pichler were alert 339 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

to a spectrum running from illustrated weeklies, the fashion press, and little magazines in art and architecture to alternative, free-­press periodicals. 104. In this case, the literal support was a tubular metal structure on wheels. The mechanism required eight people to operate it from within the apartment. For a description, see Heinrich Klotz, Haus-­Rucker-­Co: 1967 bis 1983 (Braunschweig, Germany: Vierweg, 1984), 66. 105. “Spaces will more consciously have haptic, optic, and acoustic properties, and contain informational effects while directly expressing emotional needs” (Hollein, “Everything Is Architecture,” 239). 106. Hollein, “Everything Is Architecture,” 239. Hollein described his “Environment Pill” in terms of medications taken to control agoraphobia or claustrophobia. Recognizing that such phobias made as powerful an impact on the experience of space as more traditionally tectonic factors, the pill was envisioned as a means for chemically designing architectural experience (interview with Hollein, August 18, 2006). For an examination of the architectural interest in LSD during these years, see Felicity D. Scott, “Acid Visions,” Grey Room 23 (April 2006): 22–­39. 107. The footage was used for a short program devoted to Hollein for the series “Das österreichische Portrait,” broadcast on July 12, 1969, on the Austrian national broadcaster ORF. 108. Hans Hollein, “Neue Konzeptionen aus Wien: Fragmentarische Anmerkungen eines Beteiligen,” Bau 2–­3 (1969): 15. 109. Hollein, “Neue Konzeptionen aus Wien,” 15. 110. Pichler’s projects uncannily recall the shape and form of devices for sensory isolation already envisioned in the early twentieth-­century science fiction, such as Hugo Gernsback’s Isolator, conceived to thwart the distractions facing industrial office workers. 111. Oswald Wiener, Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1969). The appendix has been translated as “Appendix A: The Bio-­Adapter,” in Die Wiener Gruppe: Ein Moment der Moderne 1954–­1960, edited by Peter Weibel (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1997), 690–­98. 112. Le Corbusier, “Esprit et Verité” (1931), in French Film Theory and Criticism 1917–­1939, edited by Richard Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 113. Hollein’s “everything” echoed other expansive injunctions at the end of the 1960s, notably Joseph Beuys’s contemporaneous slogan Jedes Mensch ein ­Kunstler (everyone is an artist) widely disseminated in the context of his partici­pation in Documenta 5 in 1972. Hollein had come to know Beuys in the mid-­1960s, when the latter invited him to teach at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. On the relationship between Hollein and Beuys, see Eva Branscome, “Triptych for an Ideal Museum: Hollein, Beuys, Cladders,” AA Files 71 (2015): 92–103. Wolf Vostell took up the slogan, without any indication of Hollein’s article, in Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, Pop Architektur (Droste, 1969), translated as Fantastic Architecture (New York: Something Else Press, 1971). In 1970 a group of French activists associated with the Maoist group Vive la Révolution

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started the broadsheet Tout!, which lasted until 1971 playing an important role in the growth of the French free press and supporting the cause of gay rights in France. See Manus McGrogan, Tout! In context 1968–­1973: French Radical Press at the Crossroads (PhD diss., University of Portsmouth, August 2010). 114. See Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 115. See David Clay Lange, Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 85. 116. Lange, Munich 1972, 188–89. 117. An early instance was Jean Baudrillard’s text “Requiem pour les medias,” Utopie  4 (1972): 31–­55. A reflection on terrorism and media became increasingly central to Baudrillard’s thinking in the 1970s and 1980s.

4. DISASSEMBLING PARIS 1. Hubert Tonka, Jean-­Paul Jungmann, and Jean Aubert (Signed Utopie), “Architecture comme problème théorique,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 139 (September 1968): 81–­92. “Architecture comme problème théorique” was an expanded version of “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem,” published in Architectural Design in June 1968. For an edited selection of the group’s work, see Craig Buckley and Jean-Louis Violeau, eds., Utopie: Texts and Projects: 1967–1978 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. The appearance of Utopie in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, briefly in December 1967 and then again in September 1968 occurred during the brief editorship of Marc Emery. The period was one of instability following the departure of longtime editor Alexandre Persitz in 1964, and the death of founder André Bloc in 1966. On Emery’s short tenure, see Rémi Baudoui, “D’hier à aujourd’hui,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 262 (December 1990): 74. 3. Indeed, the text would be printed as a pamphlet a few months later, Des raisons de l’architecture: L’architecture comme problème théorique dans la lutte des classes (Paris: Impressions Claude Harté, 1969). According to Aubert, the pamphlet was aimed at the milieu of the ex–­École des Beaux-­Arts in the midst of its reorganization (interview with the author, June 25, 2007). 4. Utopie indicated the events at the ENSBA as a key context at the beginning of “Architecture comme problème théorique.” The uncertainty surrounding the teaching of architecture after the dissolution of the ENSBA in May 1968 continued for much of that year, until the minister of culture, André Malraux, decreed the foundation of a new system composed of Unités Pédagogiques (UP) in December. The decree divided the former ENSBA into five groups at different sites, away from the traditional center of the Quai Malaquais, including the Grand Palais and Versailles. Architectural education was to remain under the purview of the Ministry of Culture rather than under the university system, which had been a key goal of the striking students. The initial five UP created in Paris and its surroundings quickly grew to eight, driven by resistance among students and teachers to join

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the initial structure created by the ministry. These UP laid the groundwork for the present schools of architecture in Paris. The best period overview in English remains Martin Pawley and Bernard Tschumi, “The Beaux-­Arts since 1968,” Architectural Design, September 1971, 533–­66. The most detailed account is Jean-­ Louis Violeau, Les Architectes et mai 68 (Paris: Editions Recherche, 2005). More recently, see Les années 68 et la formation des architectes, ed. Caroline Maniaque, (Paris: Edition Point de Vues, 2018). 5. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 83. 6. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 81. The reference to mediatization can be read in terms of mass media, but also in terms of Louis Althusser’s emphasis on the semi-­autonomy of culture, and the consequent importance of mediation to cultural production. The latter was developed in Pour Marx, an important reference for the group at this moment. See Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1965). 7. See, for instance, the first pamphlet the group published, La logique de l’urba­ nisme (Paris: Impressions Claude Harté, 1967). The document was distributed in protest during World Urbanism Day in 1967. 8. The result of this initial encounter between Tonka, Aubert, and Stinco was Propos sur le Logis (Paris: ENSBA, 1966). Tonka had been drawn into the orbit of the ENSBA in part by Lefebvre’s participation in the meetings of the Comités de reforme in the mid-­1960s. Organized by Max Querrien, the Comités de reforme were meetings of faculty, students, and intellectuals that began to debate and develop ideas for the reform of Beaux-­Arts education. Tonka also joined the editorial group that radicalized the ENSBA’s innovative and short-­lived student journal Melp! For two issues Melp!—­a combination of the former ENSBA student journal Melpomène with the Beatles album Help!—­operated as a clearinghouse for a range of student concerns, combining these with a pop-­inspired graphic layout. See Querrien, Pour une politique de l’architecture: témoignage d’un acteur, 1960–­1990, edited by Jean-­Louis Violeau (Paris: Moniteur, 2008). 9. On Albert’s poetics of the void and the mobile, see Albert, Une option sur le vide, edited by Hubert Tonka (Paris: Sens et Tonka editeurs, 1994). See also Jean-­Paul Jungmann and Antoine Stinco, “Statements,” in The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, edited by Marc Dessauce (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 66–­71. The lectures of Jean Prouvé at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers were also widely attended by architects at the time. See Prouvé, Jean Prouvé: Cours du C.N.A.M 1961–­1962, edited by J. P. Levasseur (Paris: L’Institut Français d’Architecture, 1983). 10. Utopie 1 (1967): 96. 11. The sharp contrast was surrounded by other marginalia, including Fernand Léger’s description of plans for polychromatic projections in the streets of Moscow and Paris during the 1930s, and Jean Baraute’s science fiction city of Phoebis. 12. Aubert, “Devenir surannée,” 104. See “Invendus invendables,” L’immobilier 49 (January 1967). 13. The source of the article was David-­Georges Emmerich, “Obstacles immuables,” Melp! 2 (1966): n.p. 342 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

14. See, for instance, Emmerich’s entry for the 1966 competition for the Communauté Européen de Charbon et Acier (CECA), which described “mem­brures autotenues . . . [qui] sont donc très légères et facilement démontables en comparaison de toutes autres techniques de gros oeuvre” (quoted in Laurence Senéchal, “Biographie,” David-­G eorges Emmerich [Orléans: Éditions HYX, 1997], 80). 15. The project was published in David-­Georges Emmerich, “Deltomobiles into Houses,” Architectural Design, August 1966, 412–­13, and in the ironically titled “Charrettes!,” Architecture mouvement continuité 161 (November 1967). 16. Emmerich, “Deltomobiles into Houses,” 412. 17. Emmerich, “Deltomobiles into Houses,” 412. 18. Emmerich, “Deltomobiles into Houses,” 412. 19. Emmerich humorously proposed the creation of a “Centre Scientifique de la Démolition des Bâtiments” (Scientific Center for the Demolition of ­Buildings)— ­a play on the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, the French organization devoted to the research, development, and approval of new materials for use in construction. In contrast to the latter, the task of the Centre Scientifique de la Démolition des Bâtiments would be to render “ephemeral” buildings constructed under “the regime of durability.” See Emmerich, “Obstacles immuables.” Emmerich was intimately familiar with such bureaucracy, having patented numerous lightweight structural systems that were never approved for general use. On Emmerich’s experience with the Centre Technique Industriel de Construction Métallique, see Senéchal, “Biographie,” 78. Emmerich’s “Immutable Obstacles” contains an explicit attack that equated the process of “agrément” with fascism, highlighting the politically charged subtext of technical arguments during these years. Emmerich himself had been deported to a concentration camp during World War II. 20. A key text in this regard was Alison and Peter Smithson’s “But, Today We Collect Ads,” Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 18 (November 1956): 49–­50. 21. See John McHale, “The Expendable Ikon 1,” Architectural Design, February 1959, 82–­83; and “The Expendable Ikon 2,” Architectural Design, March 1959, 116–­17. For a helpful introduction to McHale’s thinking, see Alex Kitnick, ed., John McHale: The Expendable Reader (New York: GSAPP Books, 2012). 22. McHale, “Expendable Ikon 1,” 82. 23. Jean Baudrillard, “L’éphémère,” Utopie 1 (1967): 94. Baudrillard’s text appeared alongside Aubert’s in the issue’s “colonne critique.” This marginal column was used throughout the magazine to juxtapose different authors and different opinions, producing a dialogical contrast of voices. Baudrillard, like members of the IG, was an early reader of American sociological studies of consumer culture, such as Vance Packard and David Riesman. 24. Baudrillard, “L’éphémère,” 94. 25. A more extensive history of these tensions is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that student protests can be traced back to the early 1960s. A significant breakup of the school occurred in 1966, resulting in three separate pedagogical groups. The third, known as “Groupe C,” was dominated by various leftist student factions. This political disassembly was also spatial, as Groupe C 343 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

moved out of the ENSBA building at the Quai Malaquais to the Grand Palais. See Jean-­Louis Violeau, Les Architectes et mai 68, and Violeau, “Utopie in Acts,” in Dessauce, Inflatable Moment. 26. Jean Aubert, “Statement,” in Dessauce, Inflatable Moment, 67. 27. Jungmann, interview with the author, June 22, 2007. 28. “Cassons les Prix; Chions sur les Utopies,” undated leaflet, Utopie Archive, Theil-­Rabier. 29. “Cassons les Prix.” 30. Antoine Stinco, “Art? . . . !,” Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1 (May 1967): 39–­53. 31. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 31–­32. It is unclear whether Mumford or Giedion was known to Stinco, as Mechanization Takes Command was translated into French only in 1978. The references to Giedion’s work in the Introduction to Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (1968) indicates some awareness of the book within the group. 32. William Lass, ed., The Ford Book of Styling: A History and Interpretation of Automobile Design (Dearborn, Mich.: Ford Motor Company, 1963), 15. The book was designed by the corporate identity and package design firm Jerome Gould and Associates. 33. Lass, Ford Book of Styling, 38–­39. For a classic account of the status of the auto­ mobile in postwar France, see Kristen Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). On the emergence of styling programs, see David Gartman, Auto-­Opium: A Social History of Automotive Design (London: Routledge, 1994). 34. The technique was also transferred to Ford’s vision of its own corporate bureaucracy, which was rendered as a flow diagram charting the coordinated movement between artistic training and engineering know-­how. 35. The idea of a universal visual language was influentially imported into American design culture in the 1940s and 1950s, in particular via books such as László Moholy-­Nagy’s The New Vision and György Kepes’s The Language of Vision. The principles of visual rhyming as a way to articulate the “similarities of form” between radically disparate referents are discussed in chapter 3. 36. Lass, Ford Book of Styling, 50; Stinco, “Art?,” 47. 37. See, for instance, Banham’s comments on styling in “On Trial 5—­the Spec Builders: Towards a Pop Architecture,” Architectural Review 132, no. 785 (July 1962): 43; “A New Look in Cruserweights,” ARK 15 (1954): 44–­47; and his lecture “Borax, or The Thousand Horse-­Power Mink,” during the second series of the IG meetings in 1955. Maldonado pointedly rejected styling, singling out the “abundantly illustrated prospectus” of General Motors for scorn. See Maldonado, “New Developments in Industry and the Training of the Designer,” Ulm 2 (October 1958): 32. 38. Barthes, “La nouvelle Citroën,” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 151. According to Auricoste, Barthes’s comments on the D/S were part of Utopie’s conversation at the time (interview with the author, October 7, 2007). 39. Barthes, “La nouvelle Citroën.”

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40. Richard Hamilton described his photocollage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) as being a “tabular” image, constructed from an inventory of the conceptual genres deployed by advertising within mass media imagery. Hal Foster distinguishes between the retention of spatial illusion in Hamilton’s tabular tableau and the parallel notion of the “flat-­bed picture plane” developed by Leo Steinberg to account for Rauschenberg’s use of media imagery during roughly the same years. See Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). Benjamin Buch­ loh has linked the atlas-­like quality of Gerhard Richter’s image grids to the anomie of the archive. See Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–­45. 41. The text reads: “Nouvelle expression de l’éphémère / Oubli de la finalité de l’objet? / Thème publicitaire volontaire” (Stinco, “Art?,” 47). 42. The table figures importantly in Michel Foucault’s archaeological account of classical systems of knowledge, published at this moment: Les mots et les choses (1966). Foucault pointed to two “superimposed senses” of the table, the tabula of knowledge developed in the seventeenth century and the infamous operating table of Comte de Lautréamont, on which the sewing machine encountered the umbrella. Translated as Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xvii. 43. For an insightful analysis of the link between “spatial urbanism” and the genre of futurological writing known as prospectivism in France, see Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–­1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). Such “prospectivist” visions of the future were rejected in the first issue of Utopie as “a planner’s utopia—­divided into five year menu fragments that continue to contort themselves, designating the limit of what the liberal economy can allow itself in its current phase” (René Lourau, “Contour d’une pensée critique nommé urbanisme,” Utopie 1 [May 1967]: 14). 44. The iconography of the traffic jam was equally central to Jean-­Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), with its extended traveling shot of a catastrophic traffic jam clogging the roads out of Paris. 45. Tonka, Utopie 1 (May 1967): 53. 46. The reference to the “upside down” appearance of the ephemeral and the mobile echoed the trope of inversion within Marx’s classic account of ideology, which associated ideology with the inverted appearance of images within a camera obscura. 47. Hubert Tonka and René Lourau, “La Répression,” Utopie 1 (May 1967): 57–­64. 48. The texts were taken from Liaisons: Bulletin d’information de la préfecture de la police, in particular, “Pour la propreté des rues: “Opération Anti-­Beatniks,” and “Les Philosophes de la rue de la Huchette,” in Liaisons 97 (September 6, 1966): 1–­4, 7–­8. 49. Members of the group were attending Barthes’s seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales during these years (Hubert Tonka and Isabelle Auricoste, interviews with the author, June 20, 2007, and October 7, 2007,

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respectively). On the question of écriture, see Hubert Tonka, “Court essai reflexe sur les fragments d’un urbanisme,” Utopie 1 (1967): 64–­90. 50. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-­Music-­Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 38; Barthes, “Rhétorique de l’image,” Communications 4 (1964): 40. 51. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 35–­37. 52. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 47. 53. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 50. 54. Barthes published Saussure’s architectural analogy for the syntagmatic/­ paradigmatic distinction in the same 1964 issue of Communications where “The Rhetoric of the Image” appeared. As Barthes points out, Saussure used the term associative series, which postwar semiologists tended to replace with the term paradigm. Barthes favored the term system (Éléments de la sémiologie,” Communications 4 [1964]: 115). 55. The “chaîne magique” was a logo used for a weekly mutual-­aid service in the back pages of Elle, regularly publishing appeals from young mothers seeking apartments, couples appealing for donated strollers, or seniors looking for companionship, an anonymous cross-­section of the city and its wants. 56. See Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–­64. 57. See Kelly Baum, “The Sex of the Situationist International,” October 126 (Fall 2008): 23–­43. 58. The practice of détournement claimed to reinvent, and indeed go beyond, aspects of Dadaist montage and surrealist collage. It also subjected these to stricter limits. The manipulation of appropriated elements in détournement, Debord and Guy Wolman claimed, should be “as simplified as possible,” to enable recall of the context from which they were taken. See Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “Détournement: Mode d’Emploi,” Les Levres Nues 8 (May 1956). Translated as “Methods of Detournement,” Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 9. 59. According to Tonka, the International Situationist invited him to join on the condition that he denounce his mentor, Henri Lefebvre, whom the International Situationist accused of plagiarizing its work on 1871 Paris Commune. The twelfth issue of the IS journal in 1969 derisively refers to Tonka as having published an “oeuvrette à la mode.” 60. Tonka and Lourau, “La Répression,” 60–­61. 61. The phrase is from Anne-­Marie Raimond, “Les grandes ensembles ont enfin un visage et un coeur,” Elle, March 10, 1966, 45. 62. Banham, “A Clip-­On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1965). On Banham and clip-­on architecture, see chapter 1. 63. See the proposals for flexible industrialized housing, “Proposition d’habitations industrialisées à possibilités multiples,” that Jungmann, Aubert, Stinco, in collaboration with the office of Jean Sémichon, realized for a competition organized by the C.E.C.A., the Steel and Coal Board of the European Community in 1966.

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64. Reyner Banham, “Monumental Windbags,” New Society 11, no. 290 (April 18, 1968): 569–­70. 65. Banham, “Monumental Windbags.” 66. Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 2 (April 1965): 70–­79. 67. Banham, “Home Is Not a House.” 68. For a description of the drawing panels and the two-­month process of the mise-­ en-­forme, see Antoine Stinco, “Mes Beaux-­Arts,” Criticat 9 (March 2012): 24–­45. 69. At a conference held on the occasion of Structures Gonflables, Jungmann recalled Cedric Price’s criticism of the group’s attempt to use a geometric rationality for inflatables, a set of constraints that he saw as at odds with the material technology of pneumatics (interview with the author, June 22, 2006). 70. Photographs from the period reveal that elements of the projected tensegrity structure were produced as prototypes in 1967. The images were published in Architectural Design in June 1968 and in a more extended form in David-­ Georges Emmerich, Exercices de géométrie constructive; travaux d’étudiants (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-­Arts, 1970). 71. For a detailed account of these projects, including the relationship to Otto, see Marc Dessauce, ed., The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 82–­107. See also Frei Otto, ed., Zugbeanspruchte Konstruktionen (Frankfurt: Ullstein Verlag, 1962). 72. The distinction between ephemerality of prêt-­à-­porter and the timelessness of couture was theorized by Barthes at the time: “The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges: Refereed by a Philosopher,” Marie Claire, September 1967, 43–­44. See also Barthes, The Language of Fashion (New York: Berg, 2006), 86–­90; and Didier Grumbach, Histoires de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1993). It was two young curators—­François Mathey and François Barré—­connected to the world of design, rather than architecture, who encouraged Aubert, Jungmann, and Stinco to develop mass-­producible furniture prototypes, and placed them in contact with fabricators. Mathey and Barré would go on to found the Centre de Création Industrielle in 1969. 73. See, again, Dessauce’s argument in The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68. An important trace of this tension is the fact that, unlike almost every other architectural group active in the late 1960s, the architects in Utopie developed their design work under a distinct identity: AJS Aerolande. The group’s reception in the architectural press, however, rarely respected such a distinction—­pneumatic designs were featured alongside, and read in terms of, statements authored by the group. See, for instance, “Utopie,” in Architectural Design, June 1968, 256. 74. The full title of the exhibition highlighted this spectrum. Exposition international structures gonflables: Véhicules et engins terrestres, marins, aériens, spatiaux, dispositifs, appareils, outils, travaux d’art, constructions, architecture, meubles, jouets, accessoires de plage, oeuvres d’artistes, objets publicitaires, arrangements pour jeux et fêtes. 75. Jacques Michel, “Le monde dynamique des structures gonflables,” Le Monde, March 14, 1968.

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76. The exhibition catalog compiled much of this technical information. See Utopie, eds., Structures Gonflables (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1968). The ambition, according to Tonka, was to create for pneumatics the equivalent of the Manufacture française d’armes et cycles de Saint-­Etienne, a product catalog not unlike the Sears-­Roebuck catalog in the United States. 77. Isabelle Auricoste and Hubert Tonka, “Essai sur technique et société,” in Utopie, Structures Gonflables, 7–­24. 78. Auricoste and Tonka, “Essai sur technique et société,” 10. 79. Auricoste and Tonka, “Essai sur technique et société,” 19. 80. Francastel had a personal connection to the group, as supervisor to Auricoste’s dissertation (Auricoste, interview with the author, November 2007). References to Francastel’s work appear in “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem,” Architectural Design, June 1968, 255; and “Architecture Comme Problème Théorique,” in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui. Amid the juxtapositions of images and fragments in Stinco’s contribution to the first issue were numerous fragments from Francastel’s Art et technique au XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Minuit, 1956). Translated as Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, foreword by Yve-­Alain Bois, translated by Randall Cherry (New York: Zone Books, 2000). 81. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 6. The book was initially written as Baudrillard’s dissertation, under the supervision of Lefebvre, Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. For an account of Baudrillard’s position in the intellectual nebulae of Paris at the time, see Sylvère Lotringer, “Remember Foucault,” October 126 (Fall 2008): 3–­22. 82. In elaborating his notion of “plastic thought,” Franscastel drew on the work of the labor sociologist Georges Friedmann, who had linked changes in technology and the division of labor to the mode in which energy was procured and controlled, from the harnessing of wind and water power to the industrial exploitation of steam and coal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the mid-­twentieth century’s development of nuclear fission. Such “abstract energy,” ­detached from human and animal labor power, entailed not only a corresponding transformation in the refinement and expansion of mechanization but a more complete rationalization of work processes, resulting in an unprece­dented leap into what Friedmann called “l’environnement technologique.” See Friedmann, Où va le travail humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). Francastel drew in particular on a special issue of UNESCO’s International Social Science Bulletin, titled “The Social Consequences of Technological Progress,” edited by Friedmann in 1952. 83. See Giedion, Space, Time, Architecture, lv–­lvi. 84. Francastel, Art and Technology, 220. 85. Francastel, Art and Technology, 220. 86. Francastel, Art and Technology, 166. 87. Francastel, Art and Technology, 225. 88. While Francastel does not use the term post-­industrial, the shift he describes—­ from industrial mechanization to the manipulation of symbols and signs—­ anticipates theories of “post-­industrial society” that emerged in the 1960s. Alain Touraine, one of the influential figures to develop the term, also emerged from the milieu surrounding Friedmann. See Touraine, La société post-­industrielle (Paris: Denoel, 1969). 348 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

89. See Yve-­Alain Bois, foreword to Francastel, Art and Technology, 12. 90. Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). Here Baudrillard invokes the Marxian distinction between emancipation and freedom, which held that while the Industrial Revolution emancipated the subject from the structures of religion, morality, and family, such a liberation was not actual freedom but simply the liberty to sell oneself as labor-­power. He offers an analogous distinction between the functional object as “emancipated” from the symbolic “theatricality” of an early era, while not being “liberated” in any proper sense. 91. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 2. 92. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 7–­10. The notion of “combinant variations” developed in Barthes’s distinction between denotation and connotation in “Éléments de sémiologie” was a key source for Baudrillard, who recast it as “marginal difference.” Baudrillard cites the magazines Maison francaise and Mobilier et décoration as his sources. While he describes several advertisements for furniture systems, none of the images are reproduced. 93. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 52; Le système des objets, 70. 94. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 56. 95. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 58–­59. 96. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 67. 97. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 9. 98. See Baudrillard, System of Objects, 196–­97, as well as the reading of Simondon on p. 204. 99. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 5. 100. Antoine Stinco, “Boredom, School, Utopie,” in Inflatable Moment, 70. 101. Such a contradiction indeed strained the group, but it also participated in a larger reconsideration within Marxist theory, where existing notions of base and superstructure appeared insufficient for adequately theorizing the importance of information, media, and culture within relations of production. The role of media would become more directly analyzed by Baudrillard in issues of Utopie from the early 1970s: “The Mirror of Production,” Utopie 5 (May 1972): 43–­57; and “Requiem pour les medias,” Utopie 4 (1972): 31–­55. 102. The structuralist notion of the “combinatoire” was taken up elsewhere in architectural culture at this time, notably in the work of the Atelier de Montrouge for the planning of the new town of Vaudreuil. See Jean Renaudie, “Pour une connaissance de la ville,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 149 (October–­November 1969): 12. For an analysis, see Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 213–­15. 103. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 89. 104. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 89. 105. L’architecture d’aujourd’hui was physically organized around such a separation: all advertisement appeared in a single, separately numbered section at the front of the journal. 106. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 90. 107. In this sense, the group’s publication tactics were not unlike the way in which artists such as Daniel Buren and Dan Graham targeted the space of magazines 349 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

during the same years. See, in particular, the analysis of Benjamin Buchloh in “Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Neo-­Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). 108. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 87. The fragments read: “Urbanism: 88% of suburbanites congratulate themselves on leaving the city,” and “two secret itineraries: avoid traffic jams and gain time on your way to work in Paris.” 109. The importance of Parly 2 was described in more detail in Utopie, Logique de l’urbanisme (1967). For an analysis of Parly 2 in the larger context of French “villes nouvelles,” see Cupers, Social Project, 247–­52. 110. Utopie, “Architecture comme probleme théorique,” 88. Opening in 1969, Paris 2 changed its name to Parly 2 following legal action brought by the city of Paris. 111. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 89. 112. On the tower, see Nicolas Schöffer, La ville cybernetique (Paris: Tchou, 1969), 141–­69. Baudrillard’s analysis appears in “Design and Environment,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos, 1981), 194–­96. 113. Marc Heimer, “Huit mois d’enquête pour venir au bout des secrets du Paris futur,” Paris-­Match, July 2, 1967, 42–­43. Utopie cited this particular issue of Paris-­ Match in “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem.” 114. Hubert Tonka, interview with the author, October 3, 2011. The article contains other examples of such ironic pairings, such as the inclusion of a fragment of Le Corbusier’s 1925 text “Destin de Paris,” in an ad for the imaginary firm “L’Industriearchitecte” (Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 86). 115. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème theorique,” 85, 90. The group drew on Herbert Marcuse’s critique of mechanisms of political and cultural “integration” within advanced industrial society, as they were elaborated in One-­ Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964). 116. See Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), translated by Robert Bononno as The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 117. See the passage “L’ordre, art, technique,” in Utopie, “Architecture comme problème theorique,” 90–­91. 118. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 85. 119. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 83. 120. Utopie, “Architecture comme problème théorique,” 87. The phrase might be seen within a longer history in which Luna Parks and fun fairs serve as figures for the capitalist metropolis. Manfredo Tafuri’s reference to Luna Park, in his “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,” drew on Walter Benjamin’s reference to the “fun fair” as a site where the workforce of the metropolis developed an “art of being off center,” in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” See Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,” Contropiano, no. 1 (1969): 52. A few years later, in Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas would take the figure up more literally and produce a speculative archaeology of the actual Luna Park in Coney Island. 350 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

121. Already in the 1950s, Debord and Wolman writings on détournement sought to link criticism and laughter in a mode they called the “parodic-­serious.” See Debord and Gil Wolman, “Détournement.” A rival source was the mixture of parody, absurdism, and seriousness characteristic of the Collège de la Pata­ physique, to which Baudrillard belonged. 122. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 143. 123. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 110. 124. The collaboration appeared at a moment when many architects refused to engage in competitions for state commissions and were deeply skeptical of salaried work in an architectural office. The case of Utopie also provides an opportunity to think about how such group formations related to larger efforts on the left to break down the conditions of work during the 1960s and early 1970s. In their well-­known analysis of the reorganization of work in postwar France, Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski have noted how the “artistic critique” of labor, the demand for reorganizing work around small, creative, self-­managing groups, in contrast to salaried, industrial work, “dismantled of the world of work” in ways that were reincorporated by an emerging neoliberal phase of capitalist management in the 1980s. Autonomy, flexibility, mobility, and continual reinvention would become the new norms demanded of the labor force. See Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), 217–­45. 125. The practical knowledge of print techniques gathered in making Utopie would remain important to several group members in their later careers. Shortly after 1968, Jungmann organized a printing workshop modeled on the American Free Press network at the short-­lived L’Institut de l’Environnement, established in Les Halles just prior to its demolition. As a part of UP6 in the early 1970s, he established another open printing workshop called atelier ZZZ, which produced its own eponymous magazine. Tonka, Jungmann, and Aubert later collaborated on the magazine L’ivre de pierres. The production of a magazine was crucial to the teaching of Aubert during the time he taught in the faculty of urbanism at the newly formed Université de Vincennes. When Utopie left Anthropos editions in 1971, Tonka and Auricoste established the commercial printing house L’Imprimerie Quotidienne in Antony, which printed Utopie during the 1970s as well as other magazines, including the first issues of Semiotext(e). 126. Jungmann stressed the difference between designing objects for manufacture and independent architectural practice (interview with the author, June 2007). The position of the architects was also described in a letter of October 19, 1967, Utopie Archive, Theil-­Rabier. 127. “Utopie Dialectique,” Utopie 1 (May 1967): 54.

5. SCENARIOS AND COUNTERSCENARIOS 1. Magazine editors played a crucial role in supporting such unconventional “projects” in these years, bringing them into contact with international audiences. These included Gio Ponti and Lisa Licitra Ponti, editors of Domus, and Alessandro Mendini, who edited Casabella from 1970 to 1976. Mendini made this journal into a key platform for groups such as Superstudio, Archizoom, 351 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5













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9999, UFO, Strum, and others. See Olympia Kazi, interview with Alessandro Mendini, in Colomina and Buckley, Clip/Stamp/Fold, 458–­61. 2. The group was active until roughly 1978 and officially closed the office in 1982. Beyond these five, the group also included less permanent members, including Marianne Burkhalter, Ali Navai, and Alessandro Poli. 3. The exhibition Superarchitettura was held at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura del Comune, Modena, in March 1967. A previous exhibition of the same name, at the Galleria Jolly in Pistoia, was held in December 1966. The text was unsigned, but the exhibition included the work of future members of the Archizoom and Superstudio groups. Reprinted in Superstudio—­Opera 1966–­1978, edited by Gabriele Mastrigli (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016), 9. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 4. Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944–­1985, translated by Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 99. Tafuri’s skepticism was more immediately expressed in “Design and Technological Utopia,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape—­Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, edited by Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Centro Di, Florence, 1972), 338–­404. 5. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, “Collage City,” Architectural Review 158, no. 942 (August 1975): 76. 6. See Giovanni Klaus Koenig, “Deserti Naturali e Artificiali,” Casabella 358 (November 1971): 18. Koenig was a senior intellectual figure on the editorial board of Casabella during Mendini’s tenure. As a professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence, Koenig had been a supporter of students such as Frassinelli, who were introducing experiments with film into their thesis projects. In particular, he likened the Continuous Monument to Bruno Taut’s 1920 booklet, Der Weltbaumeister: Architektur-­Schauspiel für symphonische Musik. 7. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 288. 8. In the United States their work appeared in Design Quarterly and Perspecta, as well as in exhibitions such as Emilio Ambasz’s Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, and the Mindscapes exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1973. The group’s work appeared regularly in Japan from 1970, in the pages of Japan Interior Design and Toshi-­Jutaku. See Superstudio, “Hidden Architecture,” in Design Quarterly, nos. 78–­79 (1970): 54–­58; “Superstudio: The Single Design,” Japan Interior Design, no. 144 (March 1971), 21–­33; Arata Isozaki, “Superstudio: Traces of the Flood,” Toshi-­Jutaku, no. 41 (September 1971): 29–­36; “Superstudio,” Perpecta 13–­14 (1971): 303–­15; and “Superstudio on Mindscapes,” Design Quarterly 89 (1973): 17–­31. For the most complete bibliography, see Mastrigli, Superstudio. 9. Among the recent literature on Superstudio see Marie Theres Stauffer, Figurationen des Utopischen: Theoretische Projekte von Archizoom und Superstudio (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008); Sylvia Lavin, “Andy Architect, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Disco,” Log 15 (Winter 2009): 99–­110; Kenneth Elfline, “Superstudio and the Staging of Architecture’s Disappearance” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2009); Roberto Gargiani and Beatrice Lampariello, Super-

studio (Rome: Laterza, 2010); Amit Wolf, “Superarchitecture: Experimental Architectural Practices in Italy, 1963–­1973” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2012); and Gabriele Mastrigli, Superstudio: La vita segreta del Monumento Continuo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015). On Archizoom, see Andrea Branzi, No-­Stop City: Archizoom Associati (Orleans: HYX Editions, 2006); and Roberto Gargiani, Archizoom Associati, 1966–­1974: Dall’onda pop alla superficie neutra (Milan: Electa, 2007). Two recent volumes have come out on the lesser-­known groups UFO and 9999: UFO Story: Dall’architettura radicale al design globale (Prato, Italy: Fondazione Luigi Pecci, 2012); and Marco Ornella, 9999: An Alternative to One-­Way Architecture (Busalla, Italy: Plug-­in, 2015). 10. Felicity D. Scott, “Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture,” October 106 (Fall 2003): 84–­86; and Scott, Architecture or Techno-­Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). Pier Vittorio Aureli has revisited the writings of Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti to reframe the notion of autonomy within the Italian debates on architecture and the city during this period, particularly in the work of Aldo Rossi and Archizoom. See Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 11. The group wrote of a “process of general reduction” in “Dal catalogo degli isto­ grammi la serie Misura,” Domus 517 (December 1972): 36–­38. In the summer session at the AA in 1972, Natalini claimed to have reduced his hours at the drafting board from roughly sixteen hours a day to about six hours. See Natalini Lecture, Summer Sessions of the International Institute of Design August 23, 1972), unpublished transcript. Special thanks to Irene Sunwoo for sharing this document. 12. For a brief overview of the historical emergence of scenario planning methods between futurist studies on the one hand and strategic planning on the other, see Mats Lindgren and Hans Bandhold, Scenario Planning: The Link between Future and Strategy (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 13. On the tension between perspectival and orthographic projection, see Robin Evans, “Architectural Projection,” in Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1989), 18–­35. 14. Superstudio’s projects have often been republished in ways that have severed them from their accompanying discourse. Despite its richness, the thematic and fragmentary nature of the main English-­language source on the group—­ Peter Lang and William Menking’s Superstudio: Life without Objects—­has made the chronological and contextual reconstruction of the group’s production difficult. See Lang and Menking, Superstudio: Life without Objects (Milan: Skira, 2003). 15. The extensive use of grids and of serial repetition as traits of late modernism was first articulated in Charles Jencks, Late Modernism and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). 16. Natalini’s statement for the group’s participation at MoMA’s Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in 1972 captures this sense of disappearance and expansion: “Statement by Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio,” Museum of Modern Art Press 353 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

release 053–­46, May 26, 1972, 2–­10. On the one hand, he evoked the physical disappearance of architecture, noting that “the membrane dividing exterior and interior becomes ever less substantial: the next step will be the disappearance of this membrane and the control of the environment through energy (air-­cushions, artificial air currents, barriers, of hot or cold air, heat-­radiating plates, radiation surfaces, etc.)” (4). On the other, he noted that as design objects disappeared, “everyday life” itself that would be subject to design. “Thus designing coincides more and more with existence: no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as a design” (10). 17. Presented under the larger heading “Spazio di coinvolgimento,” the two brief texts were Leonardo Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” and Adolfo Natalini, “Arti visive e spazio di coinvolgimento,” Casabella 326 (July 1968): 34–­35. 18. The term radical architecture was coined by the critic Germano Celant to cover the practices of a range of architectural groups in Italy at this moment. See Ce­ lant, “Radical Architecture,” in Ambasz, Italy, 380–­87. 19. The most complete document of the course is Leonardo Savioli, Ipotesi di Spazio (Florence: G&G Editrice, 1972). Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio and Paolo Deganello of Archizoom were two of Savioli’s key teaching assistants. The names of almost 250 participants are listed in Ipotesi di Spazio, including Alessandro Poli and Alessandro Magris, who would soon join Superstudio, as well as Carlo Caldini and Fabrizio Fiumi, who would found Gruppo 9999. 20. On the models of New Babylon, see Mark Wigley, ed., Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-­Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: 010 Publishers, 1998). The intimate relation of photography and model building was already a key feature of key projects of the modern movement, from Mies van der Rohe’s glass model of his Friedrichstrasse skyscraper (1922) to the elaborate model of Le Corbusier’s Villa Radieuse (1935), conceived especially for generating photographs. 21. The works reproduced in Casabella were credited to groups whose participants’ surnames were listed alphabetically. 22. See Peter Lang, “Suicidal Desires,” in Lang and Menking, Superstudio, 40. 23. Natalini, “Arti visive e spazio di coinvolgimento,” 35. 24. The English summary in Casabella translates “spazio di coinvolgimento” as “making one’s own space.” I have translated coinvolgimento as “participation,” though it also connotes the active interpersonal “involvement.” See Savioli, Ipo­ tesi di Spazio, 1. 25. The earliest historical account was Paola Navone and Bruno Orlandoni, Archi­ tettura radicale (Segrate, Italy: G. Milani, 1974). 26. Targeting the authority of faculty councils and individual administrators was a way to make more direct claims about the content and format of instruction. According to Guido Martinotti, the architecture faculties were some of the earliest to adopt this direct tactic. See “The Positive Marginality: Notes on Italian Students in Periods of Political Mobilization,” Students in Revolt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 167–­201. Such tactics, he stresses, followed from the breakdown of the larger Italian student union (UNURI), which formed after World War II. 354 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

27. Pizziolo and Di Cristina, “Motivi di crisi e discorsi ai nuovi studenti,” Casabella continuità 287 (May 1964): 40. The issue, devoted to “debates about schools of architecture,” compiles a wide range of documents related to the occupations of architecture faculties that erupted across Italy in 1963–­64. On the occupations and the demand for group work, see also Navone and Orlandoni, Architettura radicale, 19–­20. The critic Lara Vinca Masini argued that “the definition of groups assumed a political meaning inside of the school, calling for the reorganization of the school itself” (“Archifirenze,” Domus 509 [April 1972]: 40). 28. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011. See also Toraldo di Francia’s memoir of the period, “Antefatti—­Superstudio e Firenze,” in Mastrigli, Superstudio—­Opera 1966–­1978, civ. 29. Toraldo di Francia’s “Antefatti—­Superstudio e Firenze.” Surviving documentation of the project is scant. The text comes from the poster realized for the 1967 Superarchitettura exhibition at the Galeria del Comune di Modena from March 19 to April 12, 1967. The text accompanying the 1964 “Strutture urbana Firenze-­Pistoia” reads: “Arriva ad un definitivo supera­mente del discorso funzionalista nei termini di una allegorica narrazione e della sua conseguente rapprensentazione nell’assorbimento del linguaggio sia illuminista che tecnologico.” Gilberto Coretti recalled that the group approached the topic in a “wholly metaphorical and utopian key, proposing a linear city from Florence to Pistoia that would include the architecture school” (quoted in Theres Stauffer, Figurationen des Utopischen, 126). See also Cristina Ratazzi, Andrea Branzi; Militanze tra teoria e prassi (Milan: Francoangeli, 1997), 65. 30. Toraldo di Francia recalled that for the final presentation, the group organized a “happening” of sorts, in which cardboard models were combined with comic strips and overlaid with projections. After a prolonged, closed-­door deliberation among the faculty, the project was ultimately given a pass for course credit (Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011). 31. Chief among these was that of the “city-­territory.” See, for instance, Casabella continuità 264 (1962), devoted to “Nuova Centri Direzonali”; and Casabella continuità 270 (1962), devoted to the INU meeting of that year. For a discussion of the concept of city-­territory, see Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics within and against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 53–­69. See also Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1968), 188–­90. 32. Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” 34. 33. “Lo spazio mi sembra debba perdere del significato simbolico tradizionale; debba perdere del significato di convinzione di una immagine definitivamente costituita, della normatività di un messaggio il cui cifrario è consegnato e conosciuto fin dall’inizio” (Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” 34). 34. Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” 34. Such a skepticism about the authority of typology marked a distinct contrast from much postwar Italian architectural theory and practice, such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers’s search for contextual and historicist symbols in Casabella continuità, to the more explicitly typological research of Ludovico Quaroni and Aldo Rossi. 355 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

35. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 361. Savoli writes: “Lo spazio non è immagine definitiva, simbolica, tipologica, ma diviene immagine allusiva, evocativa, pretestuale.” A similar loss of fixed and stable reference points appears in the fluid graphic marks that Savioli developed in his drawings and prints. See Leonardo Savioli (Florence: Edizioni Centro proposte, 1966). 36. Dorfles was appointed professor in Florence in 1959, a position Eco took over in 1966. For a detailed account of semiotic discourses in this context, see Wolf, “Superarchitecture.” 37. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4. Referring to the compositions of Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen as emblematic “open” works, Eco wrote: “They are quite literally ‘unfinished’: the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit.” Tafuri stressed the importance of Eco in the Florentine context (History of Italian Archi­tecture, 89–­90). 38. Savioli did experiment with a set of precast elements whose arrangement could be determined by the user for the Casa Abitata exhibition in 1965. See Casa Abitata: Biennale degli interni di oggi (Florence: Arti Grafiche Meroni, 1965). 39. Natalini, “Arti visive e spazio di coinvolgimento,” 34. Natalini alluded to this division, noting how the course responded to “la crisi dell’informale,” a reference to the 1964 article of the same name by Dorfles. According to Dorfles, the sudden success of pop art in Italy following that year’s Venice Biennale was fueled by the collapse of the aesthetics of arte informale. See Dorfles, “La crisi ­dell’informale e le nuove tendenze,” Marcatrè 9 (1964): 264–­70. 40. The name derived from the first of such spaces, Rome’s Piper Club, which opened in 1965. While the clubs are often referred to as discothèques, their programs went far beyond music and included experimental lighting systems designed by Bruno Munari, exhibitions by artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto and Marisa Merz, and performances by groups such as the Living Theater. On the Piper phenomenon, see Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, and Riccardo Rosso, “Progettare per il mondo beat: Il “Piper” di Torino, Architettura: Cronache e storia 13, no. 5 (1967): 292–­97; “Le ragioni di un arredamento: Piper Club,” Marcatrè 16–­18 (1965): 114; Pierre Restany, “Breve storia dello stile yéyé,” Domus 446 (1967): 34–­42; and Tommaso Trini, “Divertimentifici,” Domus 458 (January 1968): 9–­17. For a provocative recent account that juxtaposes the Piper phenomenon of the 1960s with the autonomous social centers that emerged out of squatting movements in Milan in the 1970s and 1980s, see Marco Fusinato, Felicity D. Scott, and Mark Wasiuta, La fine del mondo, exh. cat. (New York: Rainoff Books, 2014). 41. The club was named “Piper due.” The space was owned by the left-­wing organization la Società di Mutuo Soccorso L’Affratellamento. Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011. See also Toraldo di Francia, “Antefatti—­Superstudio e Firenze,” cvi. 42. The brief was the design of a “site of fun and spectacle” (“locale di svago e spettacolo”), though the Piper served as an implicit model. Savioli saw the Piper clubs as pretext for his own research into the relationships of users to their

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spaces, rather than an exact program. See Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” 34. 43. Both were designed by Riccardo Rosso and Pietro De Rossi. De Rossi partici­ pated as a guest collaborator in Savioli’s seminar (Savioli, “Per un nuovo rapporto tra l’utente ed il suo spazio,” 34). De Rossi also went on to found the Turinese Gruppo Strumm, whose Fotoromanzi were featured in the New Domestic Landscape exhibition in 1972 and as an insert in the pages of Casabella. 44. The most complete description of the clubs appears in Restany’s “Breve storia dello stile yéyé,” 34–­42. 45. The claim that electronic media enabled a new form of “instantaneous awareness” was central to McLuhan’s Understanding Media. As Lavin points out, McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (1967) rephrased this interest in terms of an “all at onceness” associated with his experience of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. See Lavin, “Andy Architect,” 101. 46. See Branden Joseph, “My Mind Split Open: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 80–­107. On the broader development of intermedia environments during these years, see Liz Kotz, “Disciplining Expanded Cinema,” in X-­Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), 44–54; and Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 47. Tommaso Trini, “Divertimentifici,” Domus 458 (January 1968): 9. 48. Trini, “Divertimentifici,” 9. 49. Natalini, “Arti visive e spazio di coinvolgimento,” 34. 50. Natalini, “Arti visive e spazio di coinvolgimento,” 36. “Nullifying the dialectical opposition between the full and empty,” Natalini continued, “interior space acquires a new existential dimension capable of fully involving its user, who is himself taken as a ‘field’ experience.” 51. The paradoxical interiority that began to be theorized in architectural interest in the Piper clubs might be seen in light of Branden Joseph’s larger argument about the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the 1960s, which, he argues, articu­ lated a cultural strategy for a condition in which there was no longer a stable and transcendent outside clearly distinct from late capitalist consumer culture. Rather, the outside was present “within the interstices” of a culture driven by regulated and programmed forms of change related to consumption and fashion. Such an argument hinges on a reading of capitalism drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari rather than that of the Frankfurt school. See Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 168. 52. The concept of a dense, high-­technology tourist colony implanted in an undeveloped section of Calabria was both improbable and a rebuke to the sprawling tourist developments that proliferated in Italy during these years. Toraldo di Francia went to great lengths to create the project’s photomontages, which were constructed from enlargements of photographs specifically taken by Toraldo di Francia’s father, an engineer specializing in optics (Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011).

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53. Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomor­ fismo,” Necropoli nos. 6–­7 (December 1969–­February 1970), 13–­26. An earlier version was published in Prospettiva 4–­5 (July–­October 1969), 4–­24. 54. Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo,” 20. 55. Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo,” 20. 56. Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo,” 21. “One sees this in NASA’s Vertical Assembly Building, where a complex mechanism is given the body work of a cube, or the perfectly spherical nuclear reactor at Chinon: two pieces worthy of Boullée. 57. Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo,” 21. 58. Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’industria al tecnomorfismo,” 26. 59. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Prefazione,” Una svolta nelle costruzioni (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965). 60. Argan, “Prefazione,” 14. 61. Argan, “Prefazione,” 14. Quoted in Natalini and Toraldo di Francia, “Dall’indust­ ria al tecnomorfismo,” 20. 62. Argan, “Prefazione,” 16. 63. Argan, “Prefazione,” 17. 64. Superstudio, “Discorsi per immagini,” Domus 481 (December 1969): 44. On Superstudio’s notion of “evasion” design, see “Design d’invenzione e design d’evazione,” Domus 475 (June 1969): 28–­33. 65. These elements were outlined in a key early drawing in colored pencil titled “Tavola Synottica,” dated July 1, 1968, Archivio Superstudio, Florence. The drawing was reproduced at the beginning of the storyboard developed for the article “Viaggio nelle regioni di ragione,” Domus 479 (October 1969): 36–­39. 66. See Le Corbusier and Amedée Ozenfant, “Le Purisme,” L’esprit nouveau 1 (October 15, 1920): 38–­48. 67. The histogram drawings were completed in 1969 and published in at least three forms. A print by Plura edizioni titled Istogrammi d’architettura: Con riferimento a un reticolo trasponibile in aree o scale diverse per l’edificazione di una natura serena e immobile in cui riconoscersi was published in 1969. A broadside with the same title was republished by the group in 1970 and then republished in 1972 in Domus when the Misura furniture series was released. See Superstudio, “Dal catalogo degli istogrammi la serie Misura,” Domus 517 (December 1972): 36–­38. 68. The material is held in several collections, including the Architecture and Design department, MoMA, New York; the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Superstudio Archive, Florence. 69. The drawers are at the Superstudio Archive and contain material present when the office was closed in 1982. Natalini painted the box’s exterior in a bright pop motif reminiscent of the models and objects displayed in the Superarchitecture

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exhibitions. Following a period trend in magazine design, the photographs collected were often images that bled to the edges of single-­and double-­page spreads. It is interesting to note that while the drawers for People, Landscapes, Machines, and Art still retain many clippings, the clippings in the Architecture drawer do not seem to have been primarily collected for making photomontages. The bulk of material was clipped from Bruno Zevi’s column in the newspaper L’Espresso. 70. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, August 17, 2011. 71. See Superstudio, “Architektonisches Modell einer Totalen Urbanisation,” in Ita­lien, Jugoslawien, Oesterreich: Dreilaenderbiennale Trigon ’69: Architektur und Freiheit, edited by Wilfried Skreiner et al. (Graz, Austria: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 1969). The photomontages can be read in terms of two “opposed images” of industrial modernization described by Natalini and Toraldo di Francia in the article on technomorphism—­the industrial city of Garnier and the Garden City of Howard. The Trigon catalog also included a conspicu­ous enlargement of a photograph of a desert landscape stretched across a double-­page spread and a loose, perforated sheet of gridded card stock, which the reader was encouraged to cut out, fold, and stick together. The literal paper model of the Continuous Monument emphasized the humble material techniques of architectural projection, a fragile, even toy-­like object ironi­cally deflating the “total urbanization” evoked in the project’s title. 72. See David Lewis and Peter Stead, “La riconstruzione delle città industriali ing­ lesi,” Casabella continuità 280 (October 1963): 5–­10. 73. When Rogers took over the editorship of the magazine Casabella in 1953 (which had been founded in 1928 and was influentially edited by Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persico beginning in 1933), he rebaptized it Casabella continuità, highlighting intellectual continuity with the editorial project of these architects. Alongside intellectual continuity, Rogers was equally concerned that postwar architecture create forms of continuity with the preexisting urban environment. On the history of Casabella, see Chiara Baglione, Casabella, 1928–­2008 (Milan: Electa architettura, 2008). 74. Superstudio, “Discorsi per immagini,” 44. 75. Superstudio, “Discorsi per immagini,” 45. See Superstudio, “Lettera da Graz,” Domus 481 (December 1969): 53. The project was commissioned, the group claimed, by an American television company. The American television company may have been a ruse on the part of Superstudio—­neither Frassinelli nor Toraldo di Francia recalls any discussions with such a producer. It nonetheless underscores the important point that the Continuous Monument was a project conceived not only in architectural journals but for distribution via mass media channels. 76. Un viaggio nella regioni della ragione was first produced as a small booklet in the spring of 1969 (Natalini Superstudio Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). A version was also published as an article in Domus. See “Viaggio nelle regioni della ragione,” Domus 479 (October 1969): 36–­39.

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77. Adolfo Natalini / Superstudio, Mobili di primavera, unpublished booklet, 1969, Natalini Superstudio Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 78. The abrupt shift from prehistory to the space age was a key theme of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a jump articulated, notably, by means of match cuts. A still of the scene in 2001 where astronauts unearth the monolith on the moon appears briefly in Super­surface (1972). The group saw the film repeatedly after it was released in Italy in 1968. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, August 17, 2011. 79. Superstudio, “Architektonisches Modell einer Totalen Urbanisation,” in Drei­ laen­­der­biennale Trigon, n.p. 80. Superstudio, “Discorsi per immagine,” 44. 81. Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 63. 82. Superstudio, “Il Monumento Continuo,” unpublished booklet, May 1969, Nata­lini Superstudio Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The document specified that it was a story­ board for a film for the American television company M.C.W. See also Superstudio, “The Continuous Monument Series,” Japan Interior Design 140 (1970): 21–­34; and Superstudio, “Deserti naturali e artificiali,” Casabella, 18–­22. While the same drawings were used in each presentation, the exact configuration varies slightly. 83. The film develops its loose narrative through a single sequence with seven different subplots, each ranging between eight and twenty-­four storyboard frames. 84. See Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (Leipzig, Germany: Verlag Dr. Rolf Passer, 1933). Kaufmann’s work on “revolutionary” neoclassical architects such as Ledoux and Boullée had been put in the spotlight by Aldo Rossi, both in L’archi­ttetura della città (1966), and earlier in Rossi, “Emil Kaufmann e l’arc­hi­tet­tura dell’illuminismo,” Casabella continuità 222 (November 1958): 42–­47. 85. The quote was taken from Malevich’s Die Gegenstandlose Welt (Non-­Objective World) (Munich: Albert Langen, 1928). 86. The interest in the works of artists such as Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria has been stressed in Gargiani and Lampiarello, Super­ studio, 25–­26. 87. The gridded drawing used for this photomontage was also used for a very different drawing that was never published yet that suggests a different attitude to the Continuous Monument. Rather than place the gridded paper within a photomechanical ground, Natalini inserted a colored band with clouds, hills, and rainbows within the drawing’s viaduct-­like arches. The band was designed to slide through the arches when pulled, creating a primitive type of animation. Conceptually, it suggests that the Continuous Monument was not strictly an object in a landscape but a device through which to see landscape (Natalini Super­studio Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). 360 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

88. Superstudio, “Deserti Naturali e Artificiali,” 22. The phrase also appears in the description of the Trigon 69 installation. 89. Superstudio, “Deserti Naturali e Artificiali,” 22; English in original. The interior edges were carefully retouched in black to create an optically crisp edge when rephotographed. 90. Superstudio, “Lettera da Graz,” 53. 91. Copyright is given in the margin in Casabella. 92. Beatriz Colomina has formulated the importance of jet travel in the formation of the figure of the “global architect.” See Colomina, “Toward a Global Architect,” in Architects’ Journeys: Building Traveling Thinking (New York: GSAPP Books, 2011), 20–­49. Irene Sunwoo has noted the importance of jet travel in the transformation of London’s Architectural Association at this moment. See Sunwoo, “Pedagogy’s Progress: Alvin Boyarsky’s International Institute of Design,” Grey Room 34 (Winter 2009): 28–­57. Many of the architects and designs included in the New Domestic Landscape exhibition at MoMA in 1972 came to New York for the opening. In the early 1970s Natalini also began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. 93. The most conspicuous aspect was the bias for high-­resolution, full-­color photography overlaid with minimal amount of text. Posters from just a few years earlier tended to use a mixture of text and illustrations, and would not have been suited to the making of such a photomontage. See Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Stiftung, 2004). 94. Superstudio, “Dal catalogo degli Istogrammi la Serie Misura,” Domus 571 (December 1972): 9. The histograms were published in 1969 as a series of cardboard models, and subsequently as a print with Plura edizioni in Milan. The histograms were also referred to as the “tombs of the architects,” reinforcing the association between the cultural technology of the grid and the turn against the figure of the creative architect. The most famous use of the laminate was Superstudio’s Misura furniture produced by Zanotta as the Quaderna series beginning in 1972. 95. Toraldo di Francia and Natalini have both cited the importance of situationist ideas for Superstudio (Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011; and Adolfo Natalini, “Superstudio in Middelburg: Avantgarde and Resistance,” in Superstudio: The Middelburg Lectures, edited by Valentijn Byvanck [Middelburg, The Netherlands: De Vleeshal, 2005]). While there is an engagement with practices of détournement, it would be an exaggeration to claim, as Natalini has, that Superstudio was a “situtionist movement.” The importance of the workerist critique of labor was first emphasized by Felicity Scott; see note 10. 96. Adolfo Natalini, “Lecture at the AA School of Architecture, London, March 3, 1971,” in Lang and Menking, Superstudio, 167. 97. Natalini alluded to such a tension in the lecture, noting how the spheres of theory and practice had “become separated even while remaining clearly connected” (“Lecture,” 166). 98. Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011. 99. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, August 17, 2011. A detailed story­ board, together with notes for voice-­over and camera movements is preserved 361 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

in the Notebook, Tesi di Laurea, Archivio Superstudio, Florence. The second film was composed from footage shot on a 16 mm dolly-­mounted camera that was physically maneuvered inside the model. 100. In 1969 the group realized the short film Architettura Interplanetaria with Alessandro Poli, a student from the Spazio di Coinvolgimento course who briefly joined Superstudio. The film postulated an extraterrestrial architecture by combining 8 mm footage of the Apollo moon landing, available from news kiosks in Florence, with drawings, photomontages, and material cut from illustrated weeklies. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, August 17, 2011. For an account of the film, see Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, eds., Other Space Odysseys: Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, Alessandro Poli (Montreal: CCA, 2010). 101. Superstudio, “Summary: Five Acts,” quoted in Lang and Menking, Superstudio, 176. See also Superstudio, “Vita educazione cerimonia amore morte,” Casabella 367 (July 1972): 26. Three films are extant, Architettura Interplanetaria, Supersurface, and Ceremonia. The Continuous Monument, Education, Death, and Love, exist in the form of photomontages, storyboards, and scripts. In 2010 Frassinelli oversaw the completion of versions of Education, Love, and Death for the São Paulo biennial. 102. See Ornella, 9999. 103. On the UFO group’s (Carlo Bachi, Lapo Binazzi, Patrizia Cammeo, Riccardo Foresi, Sandro Gioli, and Vittorio Maschietto) Urboeffimeri and their use in the student protests and marches of February and March 1968, see ­Marcatrè 37/38/39/40 (1968); and UFO: Dall’architettura radicale al design globale (Prato, Italy: Fondazione Luigi Pecci, 2012). 104. The emergence of the 9999 group in 1969 was preceded by the larger 1999 group in 1967. See Gruppo 1999 (M. Preli, P. Coggiola, A. Gigli, P. Galli, F. Fiumi, C. Caldini, G. Sani), “Happening Progettuale,” Casabella 339–­340 (August–­September 1969): 98–­100. “Happening Progettuale” remains difficult to translate, rooted in progettare, a term used to denote design as well as forms of projection, from the projective geometry used in drawing to the throwing of artificial light on a surface. 105. See Carlo Cresti, Il Ponte Vecchio (Florence: Angelo Pontecorboli editore, 2016). 106. The list of participants is drawn from Superstudio/9999, S-­Space Presents: Vita, morte e miracoli dell’architettura (Florence, 1971). Pages in the catalog devoted to the Raindance Plug-­In Videotape network and to Ant Farm reveal connections to American groups and to underground film and distribution networks. Menking notes that the group’s films were also distributed by Environmental Communications in Los Angeles. 107. This list of events is drawn from S-­Space Presents, as well as two contemporaneous accounts; Germano Celant, “Sulla scena dello S-­Space,” Domus 509 (April 1972): 44–­45; Bruce Haggart, “Italian Trip,” Architectural Design, April 1972, 201–­2; and Fabrizio Fiumi, Paolo Galli, Carlo Caldini, Giorgio Birelli, eds., ­Ricordi di Architettura (Florence: 1972). For a recent account, see Ornella, 9999, 146–­49. 108. Superstudio/9999, S-­Space presents. The manifesto-­like introduction declared: “We are interested in studying that part of your environment that you don’t 362 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

perceive and that (according to Fuller) is 99,99% of it, we are interested in reflecting on the fact that, of your automatic system, 99,99% are outside of your awareness.” 109. Superstudio/9999, S-­Space presents, n.p. 110. Two issues of the group’s eponymous magazine, Global Tools, were published. The first in 1974, after the group’s founding, and the second in 1975, after its first and only seminar. See also Global Tools, “Documento 1,” Casabella 377 (May 1973): 4. 111. Superstudio/9999, S-­Space presents. 112. See Superstudio, “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte 2,” Casabella 368–­369 (August–­September 1972): 100–­104; and Superstudio, “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte 3” Casabella 372 (December 1972): 27–­31. 113. According to Toraldo di Francia, the group was aware of accounts of ARPA’s computer networks that appeared in the popular scientific press of this period (interview with the author, August 19, 2011). See Hiroshi Inose, “Communication Networks,” Scientific American, September 1972, 116–­29. On the role of J. C. R. Licklider in ARPA’s work, see M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). 114. Superstudio, “Education,” offset lithographic print (Plura Editions, 1971). 115. Ambasz, Italy, 137. For a lucid analysis of Ambasz’s curatorial strategy and the importance of media in the exhibition, see Felicity D. Scott, “Italian Design and the New Political Landscape,” in Architecture of Techno-­Utopia, 117–­50. In 2009 the environments and films were rediscovered and examined in greater detail for the exhibition Environments and Counter-­Environments: Italy the New Domestic Landscape at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, curated by Mark Wasiuta, Peter Lang, and Luca Molinari. 116. Museum of Modern Art, New York, press release 053–­46, May 26, 1972. 117. Ambasz, Italy, 242. On the one hand, the language of the model echoed the rise of hypothetico-­deductivist methods in postwar social-­science research, which stressed the development of theoretical models to be verified through empirical testing. Rather than scientific logic, Superstudio’s models turned to “ad absurdum” reasoning, pushing speculation into domains that eluded verifiability. On the logic of the absurd, and its relationship to disasters in Superstudio, see Lucia Allais, “Disaster as Experiment: Superstudio’s Radical Preservation,” Log 22 (Spring 2011): 124–­29. 118. Ambasz, Italy, 242. The ambition of such an “image-­guide” was an attempt to “develop connections between data taken from the various humanistic and scientific disciplines.” 119. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, July 18, 2011. The group used the funding from the New Domestic Landscape to hire a firm that specialized in television spots to help shoot, assemble, and sound-­synchronize the film. Toraldo di Francia supervised the editing at Marchi Studio in Florence (interview with the author, August 19, 2011). 120. Superstudio, Supersurface: An Alternate Model of Life on Earth, 1:08–­1:14. 121. Superstudio, Supersurface, 2:30–­2:37. 363 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

122. Superstudio, Supersurface, 4:34–­4:37. 123. One of the most reproduced montages from the series, Supersurface (Fruits and Wine) exemplifies this approach. Two different photographic fragments of landscape surround the gridded, airbrushed surface, and a single cutout group has been placed in the foreground, all of which converge around the vanishing point of the drawings. 124. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). 125. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 57. Youngblood took the notion from Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man. The intimate connection to Fuller’s thinking is evident in the numerous references in the text, and in Fuller’s extended introduction to the book, which opens with a science fiction speculation about “telepathic communication system” linking all the planet’s fetuses into a “worldaround Wombland.” 126. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 58. 127. See in particular Youngblood, “Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage,” in Expanded Cinema, 84–­87. 128. The ideal of communication as an immediate “telepathic” understanding appears explicitly in the film’s final moments, as two actors descend toward a mysterious light source in a green valley while the voice-­over intones: “The mind will fall back on itself to read its own history. We’ll carry out astonishing mental operations. Perhaps we’ll be able to transmit thoughts and images. Then one happy day our minds will be in communication with that of the whole world.” 129. See the documentation of Brass’s films played in the mirrored hall designed by Vittorio Gregotti in Tredicesima Triennale di Milano (Milan: Triennale, 1964). In a 1973 summary of the Five Acts, Superstudio described its use of “techniques,” “such as grafilm, animation, and shots from real life,” indicating an awareness of the genre of grafilm outlined in period handbooks. See Lang and Menking, Superstudio, 124. Grafilm was framed as a low-­budget, accessible, do-­it-­yourself means of filmmaking that stressed the reuse of ready-­made images as a way to produce effects extraneous from their original meanings. See J. Bryne-­Daniel’s Grafilm: An Approach to a New Medium (London: Studio Vista, 1970). 130. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 18, 2011; Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, June 11, 2011. 131. A number of the Caroselli were realized by significant writers and directors, including Munari and Pasolini. See Laura Bailio, Carosello Story: La via italiana alla pubblicità televisiva (Rome: RAI, 2009). 132. Supersurface’s formal structure—­ an experimental six-­ minute montage sequence followed by a more conventional segment with actors—­was analogous to Caro­sello’s separation of short film and sponsor’s message. The network imposed strict rules about the content of the short films, which could not endorse the sponsor’s product. 133. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–­1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 241. 134. Gian Piero Frassinelli, interview with the author, July 18, 2011. The catalog for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape identified the sponsorship for Superstudio’s 364 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

micro-­environment as provided by the Assoziazione Nazionale dell’Industria Chimica. ANIC was the chemical arm of Italy’s state-­owned oil firm Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi. 135. Abet Laminati, the leading producer of decorative laminates in Italy, was among the first to commit to sponsoring Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. 136. The commission was part of a wider range of such commissions that Abet Lami­ nati sought out with architects and designers during these years. According to Toraldo di Francia, the connection with Print was organized through the director of Poltronova at the time, Sergio Camilli (Toraldo di Francia, interview with the author, August 19, 2011). 137. Camilli had begun working with Sottsass to introduce laminates into Italian design in the 1960s, perhaps most visibly in his Superboxes (1966). See Philippe Thomé and Emilia Terragni, eds., Sottsass, 1917–­2007 (London: Phaidon, 2017). 138. Superstudio, “Invenzione della Superficie Neutra: 5 proposte di environments,” Rassegna: Moda di abitare (January–­February 1973): 74–­79. Such laminates, Super­studio wrote at the time, were interesting insofar as they offered the prospect of an “ahistorical” material, capable of “breaking with the old discourse of objects and furnishings,” while also serving as a “point of departure for a different use of the house” (“Invenzione della Superficie Neutra,” 75). 139. The device allowed for geographers to configure multiple rapidograph pens, so as to specify a varying range of possible grid patterns (Toraldo di Francia, interview). 140. Bernhard Siegert, “(Not) in Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces,” Cultural Techniques, 98. 141. A reference point for Superstudio’s systems thinking was the work of J. Christopher Jones, whose 1970 primer Design Methods compiled examples from science, architecture, and advanced manufacturing to codify the uses of systems theory in design. A passage from Jones was selected as the epigraph for Superstudio’s article “Destruction, Metamorphosis, and Reconstruction of Objects,” in which supermarkets, airlines, and missile sighting apparatuses were cited as “systems.” The text noted that the architect’s role was not to design the components but to “specify” and “place” them so as to achieve a desired function. See Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruizione degli oggetti,” IN: Argomenti e immagini di design 2–3 (1971): 15–20. See Ernst Neufert, Bauentwurfslehre: Grundlagen, Normen, und Vorschriften ueber ­Anlage, Bau, Gestaltung, Raumbedarf, Raumbeziehungen (Berlin: Bauwelt-­Verlag, 1936). The relationship of Neufert to the Third Reich, and the link between the project of architectural standardization and totalitarian thought, has been central to the analysis of the Bauentwurfslehre. See Jean-­Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Paris: Editions Hazan and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011); and Nader Vossoughian, “Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936),” Grey Room 54 (Winter 2014): 34–­55. Le Corbusier’s Modulor was critical of such projects of standardization yet still aimed to universalize its own idiosyncratic proportional doctrine. See Le Corbusier, Le modulor: Essai sur une mesure harmonique a l’echelle humaine applicable 365 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

universellement a l’architecture et a la mécanique (Boulogne, France: Editions de l’archi­tecture d’aujourd’hui, 1950). 142. Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruizione,” 15. 143. “Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruizione,” 21. 144. One of the first consequential uses of scenario in this sense was Nicola Sabbattini’s treatise Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’ teatri (Pesaro, 1637). On the history of scenario writing in film, see Jean-­Paul Torok, Le scénario: Histoire, théorie, pratique (Paris: Artefact, 1986). 145. Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruizione,” 18. 146. Martin’s groundbreaking analysis of Bell Labs concludes The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). 147. Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruzione,” 18. 148. See Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–­August 1984): 37. 149. The tone of the film’s conclusion was unlike Youngblood’s emphasis on the noosphere, less affirmative and longing than canny, or campy, even. Structurally analogous to the position of the sponsor’s message in the Carosello format, its upbeat description appropriates and exacerbates a dematerialized network discourse just as it exacerbates that theme through exaggerated commercial clichés, from soft focus, to a crescendo of organ music, to spiraling lens flares. 150. The source photograph, taken by Bob Fitch, has been identified by Felicity Scott. See Scott, “Code Wars,” in Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/ Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016), 92. 151. Here I can only suggest how Superstudio’s Supersurface might be further analyzed via concepts of atmospheric media recently developed in media studies. See John Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 6–41. 152. It is tempting to read the suggestion of clouds on the surface of such a mirror in terms of the sky that appeared in the mirror in Filippo Brunelleschi’s demonstration of perspective in the same city five hundred years earlier. In stressing the clouds as discontinuous from the grid, I take up a brilliant observation made by Hubert Damisch in The Origin of Perspective (1987), translated by John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 93–­97. For Damisch, the importance of the discontinuity of the sky from Brunelleschi’s painted representation of the Florence Baptistery was that it made palpable perspective’s status not as a mirror of perception but as “structure of exclusion,” a selective transformation of perceptual data that becomes visible, paradoxically, in an actual mirror. See also Damisch, A Theory of Cloud—­Toward a Theory of Painting (1972), translated by Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 153. Superstudio, “Distruzione, metamorfosi, e ricostruzione,” 21. This passage was excerpted and republished as part of Superstudio’s statement in the catalog for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.

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EPILOGUE 1. See, for instance, Mia Fineman, ed., Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012); and Clément Chéroux, Avant l’avant-­garde (Paris: Textuel, 2015). 2. This premise was explicit in “Cut n’ Paste—­From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City,” curated by Pedro Gadanho at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2013–­14. It is also present in Elias Redstone, Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2014). Recently, Jesus Vasallo has suggested the term “dirty realism” to describe composite digital images that trouble the bias toward seamlessness in contemporary rendering. See Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Zürich: Park Books, 2016). 3. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); and David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). Manovich influentially argued that the qualities of smoothness in digital video compositing highlight how the “language of new media” broke from the formal legacies of collage and montage as techniques associated with analogue photography and film (136–­42). More recently, Joselit has proposed the notion of an “emergent image,” something that arises from the effects produced by variable formats applied to existing populations of images and data. For Jose­ lit, the “emergent image” leaves behind postmodern strategies of collage and pastiche. His account draws on Greg Lynn and Jeffrey Kipnis’s efforts in the 1990s to theorize a protodigital “animate form” whose operations of folding and smoothing were opposed to the discourses of collage and contradiction advanced by figures like Colin Rowe and Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. See Lynn, “Architectural Curvilinearity—­the Folded, the Pliant and the Supple,” in Folding in Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1993), 24–­31; and Jeffrey Kipnis, “Towards a New Architecture,” in Folding in Architecture, 57–­65. 4. The allegorical interpretation of montage was initially advanced in Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” The most lucid account of montage as an allegorical procedure in the art of the 1970s and 1980s remains Benjamin Buchloh’s “Allegorical Procedures: Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 43–­56. Buchloh’s account built on that of Ansgar Hillach’s “Allegorie, Bildraum, Montage,” in ­Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 105–­42. 5. For an argument about the “iconic” turn in architecture, see Ilka Ruby and Andreas Ruby and Philip Ursprung, Images: A Picture Book of Architecture (Munich: Prestel, 2004). 6. Deleuze saw assemblage as the unifying concept within his and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, even if references to assemblages remain dispersed and germinal throughout. The most succinct account appears in “Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 503–­5). For an account of assemblages in globalization theory, see Saskia Sassen, Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages 367 NOTES TO EPILOGUE

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); in philosophy, Manuel Delanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016); in political theory, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); in film and media studies, Francesco Casetti, “Assemblage,” in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Words for a Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). My own thinking about assemblage owes a debt to many enriching discussions with Casetti. 7. To this list one could add governance, as the Expo also served as a testing ground for surveillance and traffic management systems that would be implemented in Japan in the coming decade. For an acute analysis of the security apparatus behind the screen spaces of Osaka 70, see Yuriko Furuhata, “Multimedia Environments and Security Operations: Expo ’70 as a Laboratory of Governance,” Grey Room 54 (Winter 2014): 56–­79. 8. Martin Pawley, “The Image Considered as a Structural System,” Architectural Design, June 1970, 292. 9. Pawley, “Image Considered,” 292. In Pawley’s words, their contribution appeared “amateur, unsystematic, and nontechnical.” 10. See Martin Pawley, “Technology Transfer,” Architectural Review, special issue, “Stretching Technology,” 182, no. 1087 (September 1987): 31–­40. The article was elaborated as the chapter “Technology Transfer in Architecture,” in Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 141–­61. 11. Pawley, “Technology Transfer in Architecture,” 160. In this, Pawley’s debt to Banham was explicit in the introduction to, and title of, Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age. 12. For a discussion of technological transfer in the 1960s, see chapter 1 of this volume. 13. Pawley, “Technology Transfer in Architecture,” 151. 14. Pawley, “Technology Transfer in Architecture,” 155. 15. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, “Collage City,” Architectural Review 158, no. 942 (August 1975): 66–­91. Later published as Collage City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 98. 16. See Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. On the history of the publication and the studio at Yale that led to it, see Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); and Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center, 2013). 17. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 41. 18. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 102. 19. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 58. 20. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 58. 21. Mark Linder, “From Pictorial Impropriety to Seeming Difference,” Any 7–­8 (1994): 24–­27. 22. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 103. 23. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 89.

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24. For an illuminating account of Rowe’s debt to the formalism of Wittkower, see Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 61–­104. 25. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 104. “The description of the ‘bricoleur’ is far more of a ‘real-­life’ specification of what the architect-­urbanist is and does than any fantasy deriving from ‘methodology’ and ‘systemics.’ ” 26. Lévi-­Strauss’s description of the bricoleur in The Savage Mind emphasized this figure’s handiness in contrast to that the engineer, whose materials and tools were defined by the abstract technical specifications of a particular project. Rowe and Koetter similarly emphasized the bricoleur as a figure who makes do with what is at hand and whose identity stems from “working with his hands” (Collage City, 102).

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INDEX

Abet Laminati, 284 Abraham, Raimund, 146, 336n61 Absolute Poems (Rühm), 334n33 “abstracta” system domes, 82 abstraction, 39, 41, 43, 319n93 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 133 Achleitner, Friedrich, 127, 128, 133, 331n3, 332n6; Holzmeister and, 333n20; transposition and, 129 AD. See Architectural Design Adorno, Theodor W., 10, 308n25 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 275, 363n113 Advanced Studies Program (Hornsey College of Art), 96 advertisements, 134, 195, 203, 205, 212, 212 (fig.), 218, 231, 232, 236, 237, 244, 283, 312n49; contemporary, 186; mass cultural, 269; rhetoric of, 230 aerial structures, 99, 114 aesthetics, 11, 36, 64, 78, 83, 229, 233, 291, 298; industrial, 197; tack board, 47, 200 Ahrends, Peter, 192 Aicher, Otl, 180 Airways to Peace (exhibition), 41 AJS Aerolande, 227 (fig.), 347n73

Albers, Josef: color exercises of, 49 Albert, Édouard, 29, 188, 189, 190 (fig.); atelier of, 190; modern architecture and, 229; poetics of, 342n9 Alberti, Leon Battista, 310n35, 325n42 Alderighi, 245 Alloway, Lawrence, 47, 48–­49, 50, 54; cultural continuum concept of, 331n129; on cultural hierarchies, 52–­53; exhibition and, 37; expendable whole and, 66; fine art/popular continuum and, 318n81; installation by, 55 (fig.) Althusser, Louis, 341–­42n6 Altro Mondo Club, 252 Ambasz, Emilio, 275, 352n8, 363n115 American Free Press, 351n125 animation, 11, 19, 278, 360n87, 364n129, 367n3 Animation Recherche Confrontation (ARC), 219 Ant Farm, 272, 362n106 antiaircraft towers, 142, 147, 336n55 Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, 22

Archigram, 10, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36, 59, 75, 76–­77 (fig.), 80 (fig.), 91, 96, 103, 104, 111, 123, 127, 146, 182, 185, 232, 249, 250, 253, 263, 275, 280, 295, 297, 320n100, 321n112, 323n18, 326n71, 327n86, 328n94; activities of, 323n15; “Archigram Network, The,” 76–­77 (fig.); attraction for, 75; Banham and, 314n3; beginning of, 74; “Beyond Architecture” (poster), 95 (fig.); City Synthesizer (Crompton), 87, 89 (fig.); Control and Choice project, 93, 96 (fig.), 101, 102, 103, 105, 115, 118, 119; ­Cushicle (Webb), 91–­92, 93 (fig.); Drive-In Housing, 325n44; Features Monte Carlo Entertainment Center project, 118, 119, 120, 122, 280, 327n86; environ-­ poles, self-destructing, 114; hiring, 323n17; House for the Weekend Telegraph, plan for, 94 (fig.); iconography of, 122; Ideas Circus, 111, 112, 115, 327n107; Info-Gonks, 104; Instant City, 106–­12, 112, 114–­20, 115 (fig.), 116 (fig.), 118, 120,

371

122–­24, 182, 329n110, 329n112, 329n113, 331n131; Living 1990 (exhibition), 92; Living City (exhibition), 78, 79–­83, 80 (fig.), 81 (fig.), 85–­88, 88(fig.), 89 (fig.), 90, 98, 123, 323n12, 323n15, 323n17, 323n19; Logplug (Greene), 93, 118; Media Discussion Machine, 107, 110 (fig.); Media Experiments, 1–­4, 109 (fig.); montages of, 78, 108, 116; Montreal Tower (Cook), 232; Plug-In City project, 33, 35, 36–­37, 78, 90, 103; plug-in concept of, 27, 78, 124, 191; “Plug ’n’ Clip dwelling” (Cook), 90; Plug ‘N’ Clip Room, 92 (fig.); “Robotower” (Herron), 114, 115 (fig.); screen architecture of, 79, 116; Sin Center (Webb), 245; Soft Scene Monitor, 93, 329n113; tele­ vision signals and, 330n123; transfer operations by, 120; “Video Drum” (Cook, Meller, and Sampson), 98; “Video Notebook” (Greene), 73; vision of, 105, 123; Walking City, A (Herron), 1, 5 (fig.), 33, 35 (fig.) Archigram, 14–­15, 59, 74, 75, 76–­77 (fig.), 78, 82, 82 (fig.), 83, 87, 88 (fig.), 123; first issue of, 80–­81; page layouts from, 80, 84 (fig.); pasteup for, 27 (fig.) Archigram Archives, 326n64 Architects Collaborative, The, 320n104 Architects’ Journal, 33 Architectural Association, 68, 104, 242, 270, 327n83, 361n92 architectural culture, 1, 3, 9, 12, 22, 30, 31, 44, 59, 73, 125, 133, 142, 195, 222, 284–­85, 292, 300; British, 15; destabilizing, 29; 372 INDEX

dissention within, 241; narratives within, 286; transformation in, 296 Architectural Design, 45, 51, 57, 111, 112 (fig.), 114, 146, 321n116, 327n93, 329n107, 341n1, 347n70 Architectural Fantasies: Drawings from the MoMA Collection (exhibition), 146, 147 (fig.) Architectural Record, 337n78 Architectural Review, 44, 46, 47, 48, 60, 297; architectural training and, 45; design principles and, 45; on McHale, 49 architecture: absolute, 139; as applied science, 135; as commodity, 185, 229; demountable, 188, 194; drive-in museum of, 267; elements of, 72; experimental, 24, 30, 226, 295; heroic period of, 313n60; iconic turn in, 367n5; industrialized, 203; landscape, 130; as liberal art, 15; modern, 81, 203, 223, 229, 256; movement in, 233; overwriting of, 176; photography and, 30; production of, 187; radical, 354n18; reframing, 75, 161, 178, 187; revolutionizing, 60, 63; screen, 79; spontaneous, 266; technomorphic, 253, 254; theories of, 78, 229–­33, 235–­39, 295, 300; total, 46–­47; transformation of, 172, 239; virtual, 161; vision of, 73, 178, 305n3 Architecture and Design Department (MoMA), 358n68 Architecture Faculty (Florence), 29, 241, 244, 245, 247, 248 Architektur: Work in Progress (Hollein and Pichler), 136, 141 (fig.), 142 (fig.), 162

Archizoom, 10, 243, 245, 247, 258, 263, 264–­65 (fig.), 266, 271, 274, 275, 351n1, 352n3, 353n10 Argan, Giulio Carlo, 197, 256, 257, 266 Art International, 197 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition), 314n17 Arte Informale, 250, 356n39 Arte Programmata, 250 Artmann, H. C., 133 assemblages, 252, 293, 300, 308n23, 314n17; audiovisual, 117, 250; emergent, 294; environmental, 118; iconographic, 51; media, 114, 178; montage and, 246; technocultural, 198, 222; technological, 149, 300; visual, 31, 67 assemblies, 6–­19, 90, 93; audio­ visual, 250; clip-on architecture and, 33; construction and, 298; industrialization of, 26; multimedia, 108; promiscuous, 212 Assoziazione Nazionale ­dell’Industria Chimica (ANIC), 364–­65n135 assuefazione, 286 Atelier de Montrouge, 349n102 atelier ZZZ, 351n125 Atlantic Monthly, 337n78 Aubert, Jean, 188, 190, 216, 341n3, 342n8, 347n72, 351n125; “Devinir surannée” (“Becoming Outmoded”), 191, 191–­92 (fig.); pneumatics and, 217, 226, 228; Stinco and, 204; visual tables of, 195 audiovisual, 7, 74, 90, 102, 114, 117, 119, 120, 296, 331n131 Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 353n10 Auricoste, Isabelle, 188, 205, 222, 344n38, 348n80 Austrian Architectural Association, 305n4

Austriennale (exhibition), 158 (fig.), 178 Autonomia movement, 243 avant-garde, 10–­11, 133, 219, 308n24, 309n28, 310n36 axonometric projection, 102, 118, 326n71, 326n73 Aztec temples, 131 Bailly, Christiane, 219 Bakema, J. B., 333n16 Baldus, Edouard, 12 Baltard, Victor, 192, 231 Banham, Reyner, 9, 14, 42, 43, 52, 58, 67, 69, 92, 118, 122, 123, 148, 199, 216, 217, 223, 226, 248, 253, 254, 295, 296, 310n38, 315n22, 318n74, 327n84, 331n131, 335n38; analysis by, 39; Archigram and, 59, 314n3; architectural culture and, 15; architectural design and, 33; architectural protest magazines and, 68; architecture of technology and, 59, 60, 61; Beaux-Arts and, 315n25; career of, 314n3; clip-on architecture and, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 44, 50, 78, 212, 249, 326–­27n78; collage and, 38, 104; commodity fetishism and, 318n76; composition and, 39, 321n123; culture industry and, 51; doit-yourself enclosures and, 222; endlessness and, 35; exhibitions and, 41; expendability and, 50, 317n72; factory production and, 47; Gizmo and, 91; graphic assembly and, 15; Guadet and, 315n20; iconography and, 51; IG and, 26; individual choice and, 103; International Style and, 308n21; membrane house of, 279; modern architecture and,

223, 229; New Brutalism and, 34, 35, 36, 40, 248; photomontage and, 43; Plug-In City and, 102–­3; pneumatic technology and, 222; pop architecture and, 34; silhouette and, 149, 150; Smithson and, 320n105, 323n21; statements by, 66; technology and, 17, 34, 60, 72, 320n104, 336n58; theorization of image by, 44; Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 9, 36, 38, 217, 320n107, 321n123; throwaway economy and, 50; “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture,” 33, 68 banlieues, 214, 229 Baraute, Jean, 342n11 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 38, 298 Barré, François, 347n72 Barthes, Roland, 199, 200, 211, 224, 344n38, 345n49, 347n72, 348n81, 349n92; structural analysis by, 205; system and, 346n54 Bartolini, 245, 246 (fig.) Baschet, Lasry, 99 BASF, 178 Bath Festival, 331n129 Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, 28, 127, 144, 145, 161, 162, 166, 171, 305n4, 335n44, 335n50, 338n84, 339n93 Baudelaire, Charles, 195 Baudon, Jacques, 35 Baudrillard, Jean, 188, 195, 223, 224, 226, 229, 237, 238, 285, 341n117, 343n23, 344n31, 348n81, 349n90, 349n92, 349n101, 350n112, 351n121; abstract power and, 225; industrial styling and, 225; metadesign and, 231; System of Objects, The, 223, 229, 237, 285, 349n101

Bauen + Wohnen, 127 Bauhaus, 16, 24, 40, 41, 81, 130, 318n81 Baum, Kelly, 211 Bayer, Herbert, 40 Bayer, Konrad, 133 Bazin, André, 323–­24n22 BBC, 119, 216 Beatles, 342n8 Beatniks, 204 Beauvoir, Simone de, 105, 327n85 Beaux Arts, 17, 38, 190, 192, 217, 342n8 Behnisch, Gunther, 180 Bell, Daniel, 18 Bell Labs, 172, 286, 330n123, 339n100, 366n146 Bellini, 245, 246 (fig.), 263 Belmont, Charles, 228 Benevolo, Leonardo, 9, 308n22 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 308n25, 318n76, 328n95, 350n120, 367n4 Berio, Luciano, 356n37 Berlin Olympics (1936), 180 Berlin Wall, 148 Bernard, Henri, 192 Bernard, Jean-Claude, 192 Bethnal Green, London, 261 Beuys, Joseph, 340n113 Beyond Architecture (exhibition), 92 Biennial des Jeunes, Paris, 93 Bijutsu Techo, 305n4 Bild, 131 Birch, Eugenius, 122 Bird, Walter, 218 Birelli, Giorgio, 271 Black September, 1972: 181 Bloc, André, 318n86, 332n15, 341n2 Boboli Gardens, Florence, 272 Boileau, Robert, 190 (fig.) Bois, Yve-Alain, 102, 224 Boltanski, Luc, 351n124 373 INDEX

Bonaventure Hotel, 287 Boniforti, 245 Boullée, Étienne-Louis, 146, 254, 267, 358n56, 360n84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 348n81 Bournemouth College of Art, 123, 327n83 Bowstead, John, 97, 100, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 122, 326n66, 327n93 Bramante, Donato, 256 Brancusi, Constantin: Bird in Space, 198 Branzi, Andrea, 247, 250, 266 Brass, Tinto: films by, 364n129 bricoleur, 298, 300, 369n25 Brighton, 98, 101, 106, 108, 109, 114, 122, 123 Brighton Festival, 122 Brighton Student Film Society, 98 Brisley, Stuart, 98 Britain Can Make It (Latimer), 325n51 British Aluminum Cape Building Products, 321n111 British Railways, 45 British Telecom, 87 Brixton Building School, 327n83 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 366n152 Bruno, Giuliana, 30 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 9, 11, 349n107 Building Exhibition, London, 321n116 building industry, 17, 18 building systems, 46, 91 Bundespolizei, 180 Buren, Daniel, 349n107 Bürger, Peter: avant-garde and, 10, 309n28 Burkhalter, Marianne, 352n2 Burton, Richard, 192 Caesars Palace, 298 Caldini, Carlo, 271, 354n19 374 INDEX

cameras, 8, 20, 24, 25, 28, 75, 119, 279, 315n10, 345n46, 362n100 Camilli, Sergio, 365n136, 365n137 Candilis, Georges, 236 Cape Canaveral Space Center, 93, 253 capitalism, 236, 242, 243, 357n51; avant-garde and, 11; Deleuzian theorization of, 309n28; neoliberal phase of, 351n124; postindustrial, 108; postwar, 211 Caravaggio, 199 Cardin, Pierre, 198, 219 Carletti, 245, 246 (fig.) Carosello, 283, 364n131, 364n132, 366n149 Carpo, Mario, 310n35 Casa Abitata (exhibition), 356n39 Casabella, 241, 244, 245, 246 (fig.), 266, 286, 351n1, 352n6, 354n20, 354n24, 357n43, 359n73, 361n92 Casabella continuità, 247, 260, 356n35, 359n73 Casetti, Francesco, 326n75, 367n6 Cathedral of Notre-Dame, 150 CECA. See Communauté Européen de Charbon et Acie Celant, Germano, 354n18 Central School, London, 57 Centre de Creation Industrielle, 347n72 Centre Pompidou, 358n68 Centre Scientifique de la Démolition des Bâtiments, 343n19 Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiments, 343n19 Centre Technique Industriel de Construction Métallique, 343n19 chaîne magique, 210, 346n55 chaînes de montage, 7–­8

Chalk, Warren, 327n78, 327n83; Archigram and, 74; pasteup by, 27 (fig.); on Shivering Sands, 305n2 Chalk Farm Roundhouse, 97 Champion spark plug, 126 change: historical, 300; technological, 34, 37, 215; urban, 194 Chiapello, Eve, 351n124 Chiari, Giuseppi, 272 Chinon Nuclear Reactor, 254, 358n56 choreography, 101 Christo, 242 Cilento, Diane, 87 cinema, 102, 326n75; architecture and, 30; as cultural form, 330n123; expanded, 282; projectors, 322n11 Cinemascope, 336n55 Citroen D/S, 197, 199 class, 185; socio-culture, 195 Clip-Kit, 15, 27, 36, 59, 66–­70, 72, 74, 123 Clip-Kit: Studies in Environmental Design (Murray and Smyth), 15, 27, 36, 59, 66–­70, 71 (fig.), 72, 74, 123; MM binding system for, 105 clip-on architecture, 26, 27, 36, 37, 44, 45, 59, 60, 66, 67, 68, 72, 78, 212, 249, 310n37, 326–­27n78; assembly and, 33; endlessness and, 35; mass production and, 34; theory of, 39 “Clip-On Architecture, A” (Design Quarterly), 37, 51, 68, 253; cover of, 35 (fig.) clipping, 6, 36, 47, 52, 58, 70, 85, 212 clothing, 161, 172 Coca-Cola, 82, 245 Cold War, 3, 127, 142, 148 collaboration, 29, 46, 97, 215, 223, 247

collage, 6–­19, 33, 50, 59, 69, 104, 117, 298; analogy to, 298; anti-aesthetic understanding of, 38; cubist, 314n17; cultural concept of, 294; legacy of, 292; as methodology, 300; ­photography/ film and, 367n3; prefabricated elements and, 64; redefinition of, 37–­44; social, 299 Collage City (Rowe and Koetter), 296, 299 collage-montage paradigm, 246, 293 Collages and Objects (exhibition), 37 College de la Pataphysique, 351n121 College of Environmental Design, Berkeley, 130 Colombo, Joe, 198 Colomina, Beatriz, 9, 30, 59, 311n40, 313n63, 320n101, 322n2, 351n5, 361n92 Colquhoun, Alan, 335n38 combinatoire, 224, 225, 229, 231; structuralist notion of, 349n102 Comité Vide Ordures (Garbage Removal Committee), 195, 196, 196 (fig.) Comités de reforme (ENSBA), 342n8 Communauté Européen de Charbon et Acier (CECA), 343n14, 346n63 communication, 23, 28, 59, 107, 117, 118, 149, 160, 170, 172, 278, 332n5, 331n135; audiovisual, 242; commercial, 65; electronic, 28, 75, 242, 246, 251; global, 287; ideal of, 364n128; infrastructures of, 173; ­machines, 154; mass, 204; model of, 19; printed, 75; satellite, 73, 161; telepathic,

364n125; theoretical concept of, 108 Communications, 345–­46n54 composition, 17, 297; architecture and, 254; art of, 236; culture of, 39 Congrès Internationaux ­d’Architecture Moderne, 42, 261 connection, 124; concern for, 215; redesigning, 46 Conran, Terence, 43 Constant Nieuwenhuys, 182, 245 construction, 223; assembly and, 298; demountable, 192; engineering, 144; ephemeral, 188–­203, 195; industrial, 26, 195; kit, 248; photomechani­ cal, 21; pneumatic, 29; skin and bones, 13; systems, 189, 190 construction éphémère, 193 constructivism, 53, 54, 219 consumer culture, 269, 278, 316n41 consumer society, 185, 187, 239, 281 consumption, 47, 185, 225, 250 continuum: cultural, 50–­59, 61, 83, 331n129; fine art/popular art, 52, 318n81; horizontal, 59; media, 52; technocultural, 72; visual, 54 control, 184, 292; aesthetic, 64; architectural, 45, 63; climate, 161, 178; cybernetic, 87; environmental, 94, 174, 279; invisi­ bility and, 101–­6; technical, 64; visual, 103 Control, 101, 326n71 Cook, Peter, 24, 79, 81, 90–­ 91, 96, 98, 101, 105, 114, 120, 122, 323n12, 324n33, 327n83; Archigram and, 74; ­axonometric projection in, 102; broadsheet by, 82

(fig.); on Control and Choice ­discussion, 94; Crompton and, 250; on gram, 322n2; heroism and, 313n60; on Instant City, 124; Light/ Sound Workshop and, 106; on media towers, 91 Cooper-Hewitt Museum, inauguration of, 332n6 Cordell, Magda, 47, 317n64 Corretti, Gilberto, 247, 355n29 Cot, Catherine, 188 Coulon, René, 35 counterculture, 120, 122, 270, 275 counterscenarios, 30, 244 Courrèges, André, 219 Covent Garden, 97 Coventry Cathedral Competition, 41 Crompton, Dennis, 87, 89 (fig.), 90, 91, 95, 99, 101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 122, 326n64, 327n83, 327n93; Archigram and, 74; Cook and, 250; Flip Point and, 96; grid templates and, 119; Light/Sound Workshop and, 106 Crosby, Theo, 53–­59, 61, 63 (fig.), 63 (fig.), 65–­66, 83, 319n90, 319n91, 321n111; appointment for, 320–­21n112; Archigram and, 323n17, 323n18; collage metaphor of, 64; cultural continuum and, 57; exhibits and, 320n98; graphic space and, 69; industrialization and, 26; space frames and, 54; on UIA, 66; Wright and, 65 Crystal Palace, 191, 253, 267, 279 Cuban missile crisis, 142, 148 cubism, 8, 33, 37, 308n21, 314n17; analytic, 38, 298; monochromatic decomposition of, 38; optical revolution of, 223 Cullen, Gordon, 48 cultural hierarchies, 52–­53, 57 375 INDEX

cultural techniques, 19, 70, 79, 292, 311n43 culture, 187, 223, 266; advertising, 269; architectural, 237, 238, 253, 258, 270; capitalist, 287; conception of, 53; contemporary, 256; design, 344n35; differences in, 266; drug, 24; hierarchical vision of, 38; importance of, 349n101; mass, 210, 220; nature and, 294; as physical space, 53; popular, 285; postmodern, 287; postwar, 222; technics and, 239; theory of, 54 culture industry, Freudo-Marxist critique of, 51 cybernetics, 36, 87, 232, 250, 324n29 Dada, 7, 8, 37, 134, 309n29, 317n63 daguerreotype, 20 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 7 Dallegret, Francois, 216, 279 Day, Robin, 325n51 De Gaulle, Charles, 29, 231, 232, 235 De Maria, Walter, 360n86 De Rossi, Pietro, 357n43 Debord, Guy, 85, 242, 346n58, 351n121; Guide psycho­ géographique de Paris, 86 (fig.) décollage, 187, 314n17 del Renzio, Toni, 54 Deleuze, Gilles, 293, 357n51, 367n6 Deltomobiles, 193 dematerialization, 103, 338n80 démontage/démonter, 29, 187, 236 Department of Sociology, University of Nanterre, 188 Der Bau, 335n44 376 INDEX

design: architectural, 7, 33, 45, 47, 187; environmental, 133; graphic, 312n58, 335n44, 339n91; industrial, 53, 202; methodology, 284; pneumatic, 347n73; science, 67; single, 260, 278; social integration and, 225; training, 328n97 determinism, 142, 184 détournement, 187, 196, 230, 346n58, 351n121, 361n95; tactics of, 211 development, 67; mixed-use, 323n17; plans, 233; suburban, 231; technical, 68, 203, 225; technological, 36, 60, 217, 224, 266; urban, 236, 237 Di Cristina, 247 Dichter, Ernest, 318n70 Diderot, Denis, 7 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 11 Dimitriou, Sokratis, 335n44 dirigibles, 219, 220 disassembly, 29, 187, 188, 238 displacement, 3, 8, 9, 18, 28, 43, 68, 70, 135, 145, 159, 173, 294, 300, 332n5; visual/­ intellectual, 293 division of labor, 21, 66 Documenta 5: 329n112, 340n113 Dogon village, 139 Domus, 197, 241, 257, 258, 263, 266, 267, 286, 351n1, 358n67; photomontages in, 263 Donnelly, Tom, 329n110 Dorfles, Gillo, 248, 356n36, 356n39 Doric temples, 3 Doxiadis, Constantinos, 78, 338n80 drawing, 25, 34, 110, 261, 362n100; building and, 306n8; joint-core, 3; live, 330n116; photography and, 14 Dream Machines, 86

Drexler, Arthur, 142, 146, 334n37, 336n55; engineering and, 144; form and, 145; on Hollein, 149; montage and, 147; technology and, 143 Dubuffet, Jean, 314n17 Durand, J. N. L., 39, 323n14 Eames, Charles, 18, 54, 60, 79, 108, 199, 283, 327n93; multi­ screen film works and, 311n40, 324n25; on technology, 320n107 Eames, Ray, 18, 54, 79, 108, 199, 283, 327n93; multiscreen film works and, 311n40, 324n25 Eco, Umberto, 248, 249, 356n36, 356n37 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 345n49 École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), 29, 186, 188, 189, 192, 195, 210, 216, 231, 237, 341n4, 342n8, 343n25; occupation of, 289 (fig.) École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage, Versailles, 188 economic rationality, 10, 66 Edgerton, Harold, 163 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 331n129 education, 112, 115, 274, 329n104; architectural, 186; reform, 111, 325n53, 328n103 Edwards, Paul N., 154 Eiffel Tower, 119 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 148–­49 Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 170, 224, 308n23, 311n41 electronic age, 75, 164, 165 electronic devices, 98, 119, 163 electronic systems, 102, 103, 120 electronics, 73, 75, 79, 90, 108; print and, 23–­31 elemental composition, 67, 72, 310n38

Elle, 211, 212, 230, 346n55 Elwall, Robert, 30 emancipation, 103, 104, 108, 175 Emery, Marc, 341n2 Emmerich, David-Georges, 29, 190, 195–­96, 343n19, 347n70; Deltomobile, 194 (fig.); modern architecture and, 229; “Obstacles immuables,” 193; vision of, 193 Empire State Building, 85 Endless House, 131 endlessness, 34, 35, 55 Endo Laboratories, 192 energy, 79; abstract, 348n82; atomic, 123; gathering/­ distribution of, 144; trans­ national network of, 280 Engelmann, Paul, 339n93 engineering, 45, 102, 142, 144; maritime, 122; military-­ industrial, 147; superficial artistry and, 143 ENSBA. See École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Art Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, 365n135 environment, 298, 363n115; ­autarchic, 160; built, 161; future, 291; management of, 94–­96; mechanical, 55, 60, 61, 64, 102, 103; mental, 75, 104, 105, 281; multimedia, 294; projection, 219; urban, 299; visual, 41 Environmental Communications, 362n106 environmental determination, 92, 174 envisioning, 19–­23, 53, 60, 78, 79, 101, 122, 174, 188, 203 ephemerality, 102, 118, 188–­203, 227, 238, 248 EPI. See Exploding Plastic Inevitabl Epoca, 278 Ernest, John, 61, 62 (fig.)

Ernst, Max, 172 Esherick, Joseph, 139, 338n84 Euston Station, 83, 321n112, 323n17, 323n18 Evans, Robin, 306n8, 337n63 exhibitions, 7, 35, 242, 244; commercial, 220; state-sponsored, 164 expendability, 50–­59, 248, 318n72 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), 97, 251, 357n45 Expo 67: 186, 191, 279, 367n6 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, 40 facades, 12, 60, 116, 118, 155, 156, 160, 162, 178, 204, 205, 211, 212, 213 Facetti, Germano, 54, 58 Family of Man, The (exhibition), 41 Faugeron, Jean, 231, 232, 235 (fig.) Ferracci, René, 213, 214 (fig.) Festival Plaza, Osaka 70: 295 Fether, Ben, 323n15 Feuerstein, Günther, 144, 163 (fig.), 164, 165 (fig.), 333n17, 335n44; super planning and, 135 film, 7, 26, 85, 243, 244, 282, 283, 330n116, 360n78, 362n116, 364n132; architecture and, 178; political theory of, 293 Fiore, Quentin, 338–­39n91 Fitch, Bob, 366n150 Fiumi, Fabrizio, 271, 354n19 Flaktürme, 334n36 “Flicker Machine,” 86 Florence, 26, 29, 241, 243, 247, 248, 250, 271, 274 Flusser, Vilém, 19–­20, 23 Ford, 197, 198–­99, 200, 201 (fig.); brand identity and, 199; vision of, 344n34 Ford Thunderbird, 197, 198, 201

Fordism, 43, 316n41 form: abstraction and, 319n93; early, 129–­32; historical development of, 263; permanence/ durability of, 47; similarities of, 344n35 formalism: avant-garde, 13; classicizing, 320n104; diagrammatic, 299 Forte Belvedere, Florence, 272 Foster, Hal, 11, 309n28, 316n41, 313n2, 315n24, 345n40 Foster, Norman, 286, 295 Fotoromanzi, 357n43 Foucault, Michel, 345n42 Frampton, Kenneth, 242, 353n7 Francastel, Pierre, 197, 223, 225, 229, 347–­348n80, 348n82; combination and, 224; montage and, 224; post-industrial and, 348n88 Frankfurt school, 11, 51 Frassinelli, Gian Piero, 241, 258, 270, 360n78, 361–­62n100, 362n100 Friedman, Yona, 146, 202, 203, 348n82 Friedmann, Georges, 348n82 Frizot, Michel, 312n52 Fuji Pavilion, Osaka 70: 295 Fukuoka Mutual Bank, 254 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 67, 75, 82, 136, 161, 253, 274, 281, 338n80, 362n108, 364n125; exhibition by, 334n29; geodesic domes and, 36, 59, 142, 163; pavilion by, 186, 279; World Game and, 275 functionalism, 135, 225, 237, 256 furniture, 200, 219, 257, 263, 269, 280, 284, 358n67, 361n94; complete elimination of, 324n33; furnishing elements (éléments du mobilier), 226, 226 (fig.), 227, 228; prototypes of, 281 (fig.) 377 INDEX

Future Systems, 295 futurism, 8, 9, 67 Gadanho, Pedro, 367n2 Galeria del Comune de Modena, 355n29 Galerie des Machines, 191 Galerie nächst St. Stephan, 135, 136, 333n24 Galleria della Sala di Cultura del Comune, 352n3 Galleria Jolly, 352n3 Galli, Paolo, 271 Gallis, Yvonne, 316n37 Gare Montparnasse, 192 Gare Saint-Lazare, 202, 203 Garnier, Charles, 150–­51 Garnier, Tony, 188, 253 Gaudibert, Pierre, 219 GEAM. See Groupe d’études d’architecture mobil Gebilde, 130–­31, 131–­32, 135, 332n12, 332n13 geodesic domes, 36, 59, 142, 163, 164, 334n29 Gernsback, Hugo, 340n110 Gestalt psychology, 143 Gestaltung, 17, 130, 310n36 Gestetner office duplicator, 80–­81 Gherardi, 245 Ghinoi, 245 Giedion, Sigfried, 38, 75, 161, 163, 197, 223, 338n80, 344n31; Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton, 9; Befreites Wohnen, 308n20; lantern slides and, 308n20; Mechanization Takes Command and, 197; photomontage by, 164 (fig.); simul-station and, 165; SpaceTime conception and, 165 Ginsborg, Paul, 283 Gischia, Léon, 42 Gläser, Ludwig, 336n55 378 INDEX

Global Tools, 274, 363n110 global village, concept of, 162, 180 Godard, Jean-Luc, 213, 214, 345n44 Golan, Romy, 9, 316n37 Gould, Jerome: and associates, 344n32 grafilm technique, 364n129 Graham, Dan, 330n123, 349n107 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 112, 331n132 Grand Canyon, 162 Grand Palais, 341n4, 343n25 Grand Tour, 297 grandes ensembles, 201, 212, 213, 236 graphic clusters, 79, 83 graphic materials, 42, 59 Greater London Council, 45 Greenberg, Clement, 38, 45, 306n7, 314n17 Greene, David, 75, 78, 81, 93, 118, 120, 327n83; Archigram and, 74; broadsheet by, 82 (fig.); plug-in concept and, 73, 120; quote of, 73 grid, 260–­61; logic of, 289; patterns, 365n139; renaissance drawing practice and, 313n67; structuring power of, 289 Grimshaw, Nicholas, 295 Gropius, Walter, 38, 46, 47, 66, 143, 242, 253, 316n53; academicism and, 38; historical mission and, 52; on total architecture, 46–­47 Grosz, George, 306n9, 306n10 Group One (This Is Tomorrow), 57, 58 (fig.), 320n102; installation by, 54, 56, 56 (fig.), 59 Group Six (This Is Tomorrow), 53–­54 Group Twelve (This Is Tomorrow), 54, 55 (fig.)

Group Two (This Is Tomorrow), 53 Groupe C (ENSBA), 343n25 Groupe de Recherche d’Art ­Visuel (GRAV), 98 Groupe d’études d’architecture mobile (GEAM), 202, 203 Groupe Espace, 54, 318n86 Gruppo Strumm, 274, 275, 351n1, 357n43 Gruppo 7: 253 Gruppo 9999: 245, 272 (fig.), 273 (fig.), 274, 275, 351n1, 353n9, 354n19; emergence of, 362n104; Happening Progettuale, 272 (fig.); Superstudio and, 271 Guadet, Julien, 17, 39, 315n20 Guattari, Félix, 293, 357n51, 367n6 Guggenheim Museum, 163 Gulbenkian foundation, 323n17 Gysin, Brion, 86 Habitat 67: 232 Hacking, Ian, 314n18 Hadid, Zaha, 242 Hains, Raymond, 187, 314n17 halftones, 20, 21 Hamilton, Richard, 49, 53, 195; Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 49, 345n40; New Brutalism and, 34; on photo­ collage, 345n40; “tabular” image and, 317n64 Hardt, Michael, 331n135 Harkness, fellowship, 130 Harmon, Leon D., 172, 339n100 Harrods department store, 92, 94 Haus-Rucker Co., 174, 176 Hauser, Arnold, 197 Hausmann, Raoul, 306n9 Hayek, Friedrich, 332n13 Hays, K. Michael, 11 Heartfield, John, 22, 306n9, 306n10

Heizer, Michael, 360n86 Help! (Beatles), 342n8 Henderson, Nigel, 37, 40, 53, 260, 315n30; installation by, 40 (fig.); New Brutalism and, 34, 35 Herron, Ron, 1, 2, 5, 5 (fig.), 27 (fig.), 33, 35 (fig.), 95, 112, 114, 115 (fig.), 117, 126, 127, 305n2, 327n83; Archigram and, 74; on exhibitions, 320n100; on This Is Tomorrow catalog, 81 Hill, Anthony, 61, 62 (fig.) Hitachi Pavilion, Osaka 70: 295 Höch, Hannah, 306n9 Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, Germany, 199 Hollein, Hans, 1, 2–­3 (fig.), 3, 10, 126 (fig.), 130–­31, 131 (fig.), 132, 133, 137, 139, 142, 156, 157 (fig.), 158 (fig.), 159 (fig.), 160, 163, 164, 168 (fig.), 179 (fig.), 185, 253, 331n1, 331n3, 332n13, 332n15, 336n60, 339n95, 339n102, 339n103; Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, 1, 2–­3 (fig.), 5, 6, 125–­27, 129, 145–­51, 153–­55, 335n47, 336n56, 336n58; architecture and, 127; atlases and, 144; “Background USA” (with Pichler and Feuerstein), 162, 163 (fig.), 165 (fig.); Christa Metek Boutique, 155; climatic conditioning and, 178–­79; closed environments and, 173; on conceptual determinations, 161; drawing by, 137 (fig.); Drexler and, 334n37; environmental rubric and, 130; “everything” and, 178, 181, 340n113; “Everything Is Architecture” 28, 127, 166–­69, 170–­74, 176, 181, 182, 278, 339n91; Gebilde and, 131–­32; graphic signs

and, 157; Highrise Building, Sparkplug, 126, 128 (fig.), 145; illusion by, 158–­59; influences on, 134–­35; interiors/ exhibitions of, 159; irony and, 337n75; Johansen and, 338n84; letter from, 148; manifesto of, 127, 135, 171–­72, 176; on McLuhan, 161; media and, 28, 181; Media Lines and, 28, 178–­82, 182 (fig.), 183 (fig.), 184; “Media Spine,” 180 (fig.); metamorphoses and, 129; Minimal Environment and, 175; Mobile Office, 174–­75, 176 (fig.); models by, 131, 133, 142, 156 (fig.); montages by, 129, 133, 147, 148, 149, 151, 162, 163; 167, 170 photomontages by, 5, 125–­26, 127, 128, 129–­30, 132, 135, 145, 147, 148, 154, 155; 159, 334n27; Pichler and, 135–­36, 136–­37, 139, 142–­45, 333n23; “­ Plastic Space” ­(Master’ thesis), 130; Project for a City, 132 (fig.); public spaces and, 178; “Raumspray für Buros,” 171; Retti Boutique, Vienna, 155, 156 (fig.), 157 (fig.), 159 (fig.); on scientific knowledge; 142; silhouettes and, 155; spatiality and, 16; symbolism and, 160, 173; Thing and, 332n12; ­transfers by, 154, 253; transformation and, 149, 332n6; urban e­ lement and, 175; “Zukunft de Architektur,” 135, 154 Holroyd, Geoffrey, 54, 55 (fig.), 327n93 Holzbauer, Wilhelm, 331n3, 333n20 Holzmeister, Clemens, 133, 333n20 Horden, Richard, 295

horizontality, 14, 57, 58 Hornsey College of Art, 90, 96, 108, 109 housing, 161, 231; architecture of, 237; assembling, 326–­27n78; industrialized, 210, 346n63; mass, 188, 210, 215; suburban, 213 Hufnagel, Viktor, 333n20 Hughes, Ken, 325n52 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich, 135, 172 Hunter, Ian, 122, 331n129 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 336n55 Huyssen, Andres, 210 Hyde Park, 120 hyperspace, 120 IBM Selectric typewriters, 199 ICA. See Institute of Contemporary Ar Ichac, Marcel, 22 iconography, 47, 50, 122, 125, 194, 244, 259, 298; art historical practices of, 51; meaning and, 298; symbolic, 50 IDEA festival, 126 identity: brand, 199; corporate, 344n32; morphological, 144; transcendent/substantial, 293 ideology, 11, 29, 187, 300, 345n46 IG. See Independent Grou IIT. See Illinois Institute of Technolog Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), 34, 130, 319n92 images, 19, 79, 95, 124, 166, 191, 278, 279, 288, 294, 300; aberrant, 353n15; apprehensible/ memorable, 39; categorizing, 54; clipping, 52; computer-­ generated, 339n100; continuity and, 263; digital, 292; information and, 67; loaded, 51; low-resolution, 163; mass, 187; mass media, 288; monu­ ment and, 242; object and, 379 INDEX

242, 245; paradoxical, 215; photographic, 2, 19; photomechanical, 48, 74; polysemic density of, 205; projected, 99; reassembling, 195; technical, 19, 20, 23, 31; term, 39; theorization of, 44; total, 323n21; typological, 248; urban, 154; visual, 42 imaginary: cultural, 238; horizontal, 14; social, 222, 229 implosion, 155–­66, 159, 161, 236 IN (magazine), 285 Independent Group (IG), 26, 34, 37, 50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 66, 74, 81–­82, 83, 194, 259, 313n62, 317n67, 318n81, 323n21, 343n23, 344n37; American Culture and, 316n41; culture industry and, 51; exhibitions by, 80; factory production and, 47 industrial assembly, 11, 33–­34, 63; changing image of, 44–­50 Industrial Revolution, 297, 349n90 industrialization, 16, 18, 203, 246 inflatables, 95, 217, 219–­20, 222, 227 (fig.) information, 73, 79, 115, 160, 244, 293, 331n135, 349n101; cells, 111; channels, 274; exchange, 274, 275; flow, 166, 311n40; graphic, 20; images and, 67; influx of, 282; movement of, 14; obtaining/circulating, 72; photographic, 20, 153; tonal, 20; transmission of, 274; transnational network of, 280 Information (exhibition), 329n112 infrastructure, 87; architecture and, 35; military/industrial, 137; technical, 292 Institut d’urbanisme de Paris, 188 380 INDEX

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), 37, 40, 47, 49, 52, 79, 88, 323n17, 323n19 integration, 26, 39, 44, 46, 59, 97, 102, 108, 136, 177, 199, 203, 237; discourses of, 236; meaning of, 64; political/cultural, 350n115; social, 225; utopian, 66 International Competition for the Design of Low Cost Furniture (MoMA), 325n51 International Dialogue of Experi­ mental Architecture, 146 International Style, 191, 308n21 International Union of Architects (UIA), 60, 62, 63, 66, 321n112, 321n16; Congress Buildings, London, 1961: 61, 62 (fig.), 63 (fig.) Internationale Situationniste (IS), 211, 270, 346n59 Isle of Wight Festival, 120, 279 Isolator (Gernsback), 340n110 Isozaki, Arata, 5, 254, 295, 305n4; Future City (Incubation Process), 1, 2, 3, 4 (fig.), 127 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (exhibition), 275, 285, 286, 353n16, 365n135 Jakobson, Roman, 167 Jameson, Fredric, 287 Jane, John F. T., 150, 337n64 Japan Interior Design, 266 Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard. See Le Corbusie Jeanneret, Pierre, 316n41 Jeffs, Roger, 97 Jerome Gould and Associates, 201 (fig.), 344n32 Johansen, John, 164–­65, 166, 174, 338n84 Johnson, Lyndon B., 173 Johnson, Philip, 37, 320n104, 338n84 Jones, Bobby, 163

Jones, J. Christopher, 365n141 Joselit, David: emergent image and, 367n3 Joseph, Branden, 11, 251, 357n51 Jungmann, Jean-Paul, 188, 190, 195, 216, 216 (fig.), 347n69, 347n72, 351n125, 351n126; Dyodon and, 217; pneumatics and, 226, 228 Kaaba, Mecca, 267 Kafka, Franz, 332n5 Kahn, Albert, 56 Kaleidoscope, 283 Kallmann, Gerhard, 34 Kaufmann, Emil, 267, 360n84 Kepes, György, 40, 143, 145, 315n29, 335n43, 344n35 Kiesler, Frederick, 131, 146, 332n15 Kikutake, Kiyonori, 146 Kimball, Charles, 70 kinetics, 87, 292; environmental, 90–­101, 97, 98, 110, 111, 112 Kipnis, Jeffrey, 367n3 Kittler, Friedrich, 311n43 Klutsis, Gustav, 306n9 knowledge, 46, 72, 111, 142, 331n135 Knowlton, Ken C., 172, 339n100 Kodak, 97, 250 Koenig, Giovanni Klaus, 242, 352n6 Koetter, Fred, 396, 369n26 Kohlmarkt, 155 Koolhaas, Rem, 242, 350n120 Kopp, Anatole, 218 Koralek, Paul, 192 Kubrick, Stanley, 275, 360n78 Kulturtechniken. See cultural technique Kurokawa, Kisho, 295 Kurrent, Friedrich, 333 labor, 348n82, 351n124; architecture of, 237; artistic critique

of, 3 51n124; intellectual, 16, 17, 44, 104, 270; manual, 46 Labourdette, Jacques-Henri, 190 (fig.) laminates, 283–­84, 288, 361n94, 365n135, 365n137, 365n138 landscape, 1, 154, 164, 274, 285; composite, 42; external, 280; industrial, 117; information, 162; interior, 252, 270, 271; media, 79; pastoral vision of, 149; photographic, 263, 364n123; postwar, 143; rural, 294; screen, 124; suburban, 231; urban, 188 Lang, Peter, 363n115 Langdon and Wilson, 286–­87 L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, 151, 186, 230, 232, 234, 236, 237, 339n95, 341n2, 348n80, 349n105 L’architecture vivante, 68 Latimer, Clive, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108, 109, 122, 325n51 Lautréamont, Comte de, 345n42 Le canard enchaînée, 231 Le Corbusier, 35, 75, 79, 148, 197, 224, 232, 233, 242, 253, 316n37, 350n114; academicism and, 38; architects and, 337n65; Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis… s.v.p., 151, 152 (fig.); “Des yeux qui ne voient pas…,” 198 (fig.); “Destin de Paris” and, 350n114; Lesson of Rome and, 259 (fig.); Modulor and, 284, 365n141; montage mural by, 43; Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, 42, 151; silhouettes and, 151; steamships of, 146; “tout est architecture” and, 178; Vers une architecture and, 150, 259 (fig.); Ville Radieuse, 42, 43, 267, 316n41, 354n20 Le Monde, 219

Le Parc, Julio, 98 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 360n84 Lefaivre, Liane, 339n94 Lefebvre, Henri, 188, 226, 236, 342n8, 346n59, 348n81 Léger, Ferdinand, 42, 342n11 Leicester Engineering Building, 39, 254 leisure, 288, 294, 321n112, 329n105; architecture of, 237 Lenin Institute of Librarianship, 218 (fig.) Leningradskaya Pravda, 329n114 lenses, 20, 23, 99, 101; anamorphic, 336n56 Leonard, Mike, 97, 99, 101 Leonidov, Ivan, 218–­19, 218 (fig.) Les Halles, 192, 233, 235, 237, 238, 351n125; iron canopies of, 231; redevelopment of, 186 L’Espresso, 359n70 L’esprit nouveau, 197 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 298, 369n26 Levine, Neil, 9, 56 Leyda, Jay, 311n41 Liaisons, 204 Liberman, Alexander, 22 Life Magazine, 125, 278 Light/Sound Workshop (Hornsey College of Art), 96, 97, 99, 105, 108, 119, 123, 250; arena area at, 100 (fig.), 101; closing of, 109; environmental kinetics and, 110, 111; exhibition by, 107 (fig.), 122; plan/­multiscreen display for, 121 (fig.); poster for, 98 (fig.), 106 (fig.); research program from, 109; screen environments of, 118 light tables, 22 (fig.) L’immobilier, 192, 230 Linder, Mark, 298 L’Institut de l’Environnement, Paris, 351n125

Lissitzky, El, 22 Littlewood, Joan, 33, 111 Littré, Emile, 7 Living Theater, 251 (fig.), 356n40 L’ivre de pierres, 351n125 Llewellyn-Davies, Richard, 34 Loewy, Raymond, 198 London, 1, 26, 28, 74, 75, 79, 85, 92, 126, 194, 242 London County Council, 74 Loos, Adolf, 158–­59, 178, 333n23 Lourau, René, 188, 204, 210, 211, 213, 214 LSD, architectural interest in, 340n106 Lubetkin, Berthold, 316n50 Luna park, 237, 350n120 Lundy, Victor, 218 Luxor obelisk, 149 Lynn, Greg, 367n3 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 270 machines, 60, 259, 279; iconography of, 61; myth of, 253; printing, 20; species and, 293 Mack, Heinz, 98 MacKenzie, Stuart, 329n110 Magris, Alessandro, 241, 354n19 Magris, Roberto, 241 Maison française, 349n92 Maki, Fumihiko, 148, 336n60 Maldonado, Tomás, 199, 344n37 Malevich, Kazimir, 242, 267 Malik Verlag, 312n58 Malraux, André, 341n4 Manovich, Lev, 367n3 Marcuse, Herbert, 350n115 Mariner IV satellite, 173 Marker, Chris, 142, 283 Marshall Plan, 149 Martin, Kenneth, 61, 62 (fig.) Martin, Mary, 61, 62 (fig.) Martin, Reinhold, 30, 330n123, 335n43 Martinotti, Guido, 354n26 Marx, Andreas, 309n32, 320n108 381 INDEX

Marx, Karl, 225, 236 Marx, Leo, 60, 61, 336n62, 345n46 Marxism, 224, 237, 349n101 Masini, Lara Vinca, 355n27 Materialaktion performance, 176, 177 materials, 293; collecting, 298; extracting/reassembling, 5; photomechanical, 6, 7, 11, 42, 48, 90; space-age, 123; transferring/­reconfiguring, 70 Mathey, François, 347n72 Matta, Roberto, 170 Mauer, Otto, 333n24 Maya temples, 131, 137 Mayne, Roger, 260, 262 (fig.) McCoy, Esther, 333n16 McHale, John, 37, 53, 70, 194, 259, 317n57, 317n66, 317n74, 318n75, 318n81, 322n133; advertisements and, 195; clippings and, 47, 50, 52; collage and, 48 (fig.), 50, 69; commodity fetishism and, 318n76; “Expendable Icon, The,” 51, 323n21; iconography and, 47, 51; icons and, 51, 52, 317n63; industrialization and, 26; Machine-Made America, 49–­50; media continuum and, 52; New Brutalism and, 34; tearsheet collection (Palette #1), 48 (fig.); Shoe-Life Stories, 50; Why I Took to the Washers in Luxury Flats, 50 McLuhan, Marshall, 23, 173, 251, 281, 287, 318n74, 337n78, 338n80, 339n91, 339n92, 357n45; communications and, 75; electronic space and, 164, 331n134; globe as village and, 162; media and, 25–­26, 161, 165, 166; quote of, 1, 125 McShine, Kynaston, 329n112

382 INDEX

M.C.W. (television company), 360n82 Mead, Margaret, 270 Mecca, 267 mechanization, 44, 49, 217, 224 Medalla, David, 98 media, 6, 79, 162; acceptance of, 52; artifacts, 5, 12; assemblage of, 75; audiovisual, 28, 90, 102, 175, 250, 252, 269, 296; channels, 92, 101; communication, 28, 175, 274, 305n2; composite, 7; devices, 90, 95; digital, 292; distribution systems, 181; electronic, 23, 24, 79, 90, 124, 250, 252, 269; elements, 253; environmental, 28, 170, 328n94; ephemeral, 187; expansion of, 161; expendable, 187; filmic, 79; forms, 25; hardware, 91; importance of, 349n101; informational, 170; language of, 367n3; machines, 91, 92; mass, 30, 52, 53, 237, 238, 342n6; optical, 291, 292; photomechanical, 6, 283, 292, 300; practice, 11, 238; print, 52–­53; projected, 18; range of, 181; relics, 6; screen, 102; systems, 90, 91, 101, 181; terrorism and, 341n117; theory, 19, 161; transferring, 118 mediatization, 215, 342n6 megastructures, 28, 127, 148, 149, 297 Meller, James, 97, 98 Melp!, 342n8, 343n25 Melpomène, 342n8, 343n25 Mendelsohn, Erich, 145 Mendini, Alessandro, 274, 351n1, 352n6 Menking, William, 362n106 Mertins, Detlef, 9, 307n18, 308n32, 310n36, 319n92 Merz, Marisa, 356n40

metamorphoses, 129, 130, 285 metaphors, 3, 56, 154, 160, 162, 167, 170, 173, 216, 275, 280; carcass, 93, 325n42, 325n44; collage, 64; mirror, 289 methodology, 244, 284, 297, 369n25 Meyer, Adolf, 38 Michaud, Philippe-Alain, 11 Michelangelo, 198 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 14, 55–­56, 268, 308n22, 309n33, 319n92, 354n20; academicism and, 38; Alumni Hall (IIT), 34, 55; construction by, 13; Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 13, 16 (fig.), 354n20; Hollein and, 130; images by, 14; montages by, 13, 307n18; Museum for a Small City project, 55; photocollages by, 56, 59; photomontages by, 9, 10, 12, 13; Seagram Building, New York, 232 Milan, 85, 245, 247 Milan Triennale, 93, 156, 270, 283, 321n112, 327n79, 327n86 military-industrial complex, 142, 148–­49 Ministry of Culture, French, 341n4 Ministry of Public Building and Works, Great Britain, 45 Mitchell, W. J. T., 11 Mobilier et décoration, 349n92 mobility, 154, 203, 351n124 models, 7, 18, 19, 25, 131, 133, 137, 142, 195, 235; economic, 43, 236, 326n77; mental, 278; microcosmic, 253; theoretical, 286, 363n117; urban, 233 Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 172 modernism, 133, 195, 210, 224, 267, 297; industrial, 6, 123

modernization, 149, 162, 194, 267; technological, 145, 266; urban, 233 Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam, 144 (fig.) Moholy, Lucia, 38 Moholy-Nagy, Lázsló, 8, 143, 308n20, 344n35 Molinari, Luca, 363n115 MoMA. See Museum of Modern Ar Mondial Festival (Superstudio and Gruppo 9999), 272, 273 (fig.) Monroe, Marilyn, 52, 162 montage, 6–­19, 83, 147, 149, 151, 160, 170, 172, 215, 224, 229, 231, 244, 252; allegorical interpretation of, 129, 293, 367n4; analogical status of, 129; assemblages and, 246; avant-garde, 11; cinematic, 235–­36, 286; concepts of, 11, 223, 294, 297; constructive analogy for, 25; Dada, 47, 346n58; deployment of, 186; described, 8; distinctions and, 20; environmental, 108, 250; etymology of, 7–­8; filmic, 11, 85–­86, 244, 270, 311n40, 367n3; graphic assembly and, 8–­9; image, 23, 97; industrial assembly and, 11; inter­ medial articulation and, 26; interpretation of, 9, 367n4; interwar, 14; landscape, 148; law of, 10; legacy of, 6, 17, 292; literary shock effects of, 306n7; models of, 18; modern architecture and, 223; multi­ screen, 291; photographic, 334n27; photomechanical materials and, 7; practice of, 14, 17, 160, 306n7; role of, 23, 127; rotogravure and, 312n52; screen, 116, 124; storyboards

and, 270; theories of, 311n41; understanding, 19; visual/ textual, 133–­34 Montanari, 245, 246 (fig.) Monte Carlo, 78, 118, 119, 123, 330n122, 331n131 monter, 7, 307n13 monteur, 8, 306n10 monumentality, 147, 160, 278; baroque, 256; technology and, 256, 257 monuments: image and, 242; Parisian, 150; photomontage with, 152 (fig.); Roman, 265 Moraja, 245, 246 (fig.) Morellet, François, 98 Morgenstern, Oskar, 142, 334n35 Morris, William, 44 Morris Brothers Company, 68 Morrozzi, Massimo, 247, 250 mosaics: electronic, 166; visual-­ verbal, 204 Mühl, Otto, 176, 177 multimedia presentations, 25, 28, 29, 92, 108, 116, 118, 124, 251, 274, 286, 294, 327n93 multiscreen presentations, 73, 79, 106, 107, 108, 118, 120, 291, 295, 311n40, 324n25, 330n116 Mumford, Lewis, 161, 223, 338n80, 344n31 Munari, Bruno, 356n40 Munich Olympics (1972), 179–­80, 181, 182, 184 Murata, Yukata, 295 Murray, Peter, 69, 70, 71, 72, 105, 329n107; Clip-Kit and, 68 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: Animation Recherche Confrontation, 219, 220 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 41, 126, 129, 130, 142, 146, 275, 325n51, 329n112, 334n37, 352n8, 353n16, 358n68, 361n92, 367n2; exhi-

bition at, 40; Fuller at, 334n29; Hollein and, 5; letter to, 148 Mylar, 69, 178, 218 Nagele, Daniel, 9 NASA, 69, 70, 173, 253, 296, 358n56 Natalini, Adolfo, 241, 246, 250, 253, 258, 270, 353n11, 353n16, 356n38, 357n50, 358n69, 359n71, 360n87, 361n92, 361n95, 361n98; assemblage and, 252; montage and, 252; Savioli studio and, 254 National Academy of Sciences, 70 National Geographic, 125 National Schools Plan (Price), 111 Navai, Ali, 247, 352n2 Negri, Antonio, 331n135 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 43 neo-avant-garde, 10, 11, 24 Neoliberty, 320n104 networks: computer, 30, 363n113; electronic, 78; energy, 280; feedback, 101; global, 160, 275, 283; hybrid, 79; information, 112, 280; intermedia, 281; media, 74, 79, 91, 175; telephone, 30; transmission, 20 Neues Österreich, 338n83 Neufert, Ernst, 284, 365n141 Neutra, Richard, 130 New Brutalism, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 53, 248 New Domestic Landscape, The (exhibition), 283, 357n43, 361n92, 363n119 New Empiricism, 320n104 New Landscape in Art and Science, The (exhibition), 143, 315n29 New Left, 242, 339n103 New Scientist, 334n29

383 INDEX

New Society, 68 New York World’s Fair, 79, 163, 324n25 New Yorker, 337n78 Nitzchke, Oscar, 116, 329n114 Noever, Peter, 171 noosphere, 281, 282, 283, 288 NORAD Command, 155 North London Polytechnic, 329n107 objects: destruction of, 283–­89; image and, 242, 245; reduction of, 242; system of, 224, 225 offset lithography, 22–­24, 26, 81, 204, 205, 212, 215, 284, 312n58, 319n97 offset lithographic presses, 25 (fig.) Oggi, 270 Oldenburg, Claes, 146, 335n50 Olympic Village (Munich 1972), 28, 181, 182 (fig.), 183 (fig.) Open University, 328n103 operational lore, 60, 67, 320n107 Orangerie gardens, Kassel, 115 organic totality, Hegelian conception of, 293 Osaka World’s Fair, 222, 291, 295 Otto, Frei, 180, 191, 218, 279, 368n7 Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 92, 93 Pacini, 245 Packard, Vance, 51–­52, 321n133, 343n23 Pagano, Giuseppe, 359n73 Pan Am travel poster, 269 Panel on Applied Science and Technological Progress (National Academy of Sciences), 70 Panzieri, Raniero, 353n10

384 INDEX

Paolozzi, Eduardo, 34, 35, 37, 40, 54 Parallel of Life and Art, A (exhibition), 40, 40 (fig.), 41, 51, 80 Paris, 26, 29, 42, 85, 93, 126, 186, 192, 205, 213, 216; landscape of, 188; modernization of, 203; as photomechanical group, 203; urban spaces and, 195 Paris Biennial (1965), 175 Paris Commune, 346n59 Paris-Match, 230, 232, 235, 270, 350n113 Paris Theater, New York, 117 (fig.) Paris World’s Fair (1889), 191 Paris 2 (Parly 2), 238, 350n110; advertisement for, 231; ­importance of, 350n109 Park Hill (Sheffield, UK), 260 Parthenon, 197 participation, 247, 248, 249–­50; emancipatory form of, 108; political, 242 pasteups, 5, 24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 57, 85, 204 Pastonini, Sergio, 247 Pawley, Martin, 291, 295, 300, 368n11; montage of, 296–­97; technology transfer and, 296 Paxton, Joseph, 267 pedagogy, 108, 111, 247, 275, 343n25 Pedevilla, Erich, 336n59 Peichl, Gustav, 333n20, 335n44 perception, 14, 23, 25, 31, 74, 80, 105, 145, 151, 163, 174, 271, 292, 299, 336n62, 366n152; controlling, 291; photographic, 41, 51; retraining of, 108, 328n95 Persico, Edoardo, 359n73 Persitz, Alexandre, 151, 153 (fig.), 341n2 Perspecta, 352n8 Perspex, 54, 61, 64 Pettena, Gianni, 272

Philipe, Gérard, 43 Philips Pavilion, 79 Phillishave electric razors, 198 Phoebis, 342n11 photo-sensitized plates, 313n58 photocollage, 6, 56, 309n29, 345n40; nature of, 319n93 photographic enlargement, 12, 64, 80 photographic framing, 23 photographic grid, 138–­39 photography, 6, 85, 97, 150, 354n20; analog, 292; architecture and, 30; color, 361n93; combination, 160, 309n32; digital, 19, 292; drawing and, 14; emergence of, 20; still, 25 photomechanical elements, 6, 13, 26, 44, 58, 87, 102, 145, 258, 259 photomechanical fragments, 82, 115, 160, 288 photomechanical particles, 41, 42 photomechanical patterns, 8, 85 photomechanical process, 31, 153 photomontage, 3, 9, 41, 42, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 123–­24, 125, 135, 136, 148, 150, 160, 166, 167, 172, 241, 244, 257, 258, 259, 261, 263, 266, 267–­68, 268, 269, 275, 279, 280, 285, 288; avantgarde, 7, 11; described, 6, 7; earliest, 306n10; halftone process and, 21; historical overview of, 23, 305–­6n5; iconic, 29; interwar, 11; mise-en-scène and, 286; ­rotogravure and, 21–­22 photomurals, 9 Picasso, Pablo, 38 Pichler, Walter, 127, 146, 147, 148, 162, 164, 165 (fig.), 172, 174, 253, 331n3, 334n37, 335n44,

339n103, 340n110; atlases and, 144; closed environments and, 173; Hollein and, 135–­36, 136–­37, 139, 142–­45, 333n23; Intensive-box, 175; “Kinderbuch,” 136, 334n28; Kleiner Raum, 104, 175; media and, 28; Minimal Environment and, 175; models by, 142; montages by, 138 (fig.), 163 (fig.); Portable Living Room (TV-helm), 175, 177 (fig.); silhouettes and, 155; symbolism and, 160; Unteriridische Stadt, 137; urban element and, 175 Piene, Otto, 98 Pilkington Bros. Ltd., 321n111 Pinagli, 245, 246 (fig.) Pink Floyd, 97, 99 Piper Club, 29, 97, 250, 271, 356n40, 356n41, 356–­57n43 Piper Pluri Club, 251 (fig.) Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 146 Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 356n40 Pizziolo, 247 Place de la Concorde, 149 planning, 236, 298; central, 123; city, 130; regional, 130, 243; strategic, 244; super, 135; urban, 229, 243, 324n25 plastics, 222–­29, 283, 284 Playboy, 337n78 Playtime, 203 Pleumeur-Bodou Radome, 220, 221 (fig.) Pliny the Elder, 150, 337n63 plug-in capsules, 90, 91, 92, 191 plug-in concept, 27, 73, 78, 101, 105, 120, 124 Plura edizioni, 358, 361n94 pneumatics, 70, 216–­20, 222, 226, 229, 238, 347n69; architectural interest in, 215; plasticity of, 228; structural potential of, 218

Poe, Edgar Allan, 318n74 Pohlmann, Ulrich, 9 Point du Gard, 267 Poli, Alessandro, 245, 352n2, 354n19, 362n100 politics, 3, 24, 185, 186, 219, 276, 299; cultural, 122; left-wing, 243; media, 123; visual assemblages and, 31 Pollock, Jackson, 35, 37 Pompe, Antoine, 12, 13, 14 Pont du Gard, 267 Pont Transbordeur, postcard of, 21 (fig.) Ponte Vecchio, 271 Ponti, Lisa Licitra, 31n1 Ponti, Tio, 351n1 pop art, 53, 54, 158, 284, 313n62 Popular Front, 9, 43 Portman, John, 287 postcards: photomontage, 149, 312n50; satirical, 21 (fig.), 149 postindustrial society, 310–­11n39, 348n88 Prachensky, Markus, 135 prefabrication dwelling units, 215 Presley, Elvis, 52 Price, Cedric, 27, 191, 210, 249, 253, 329n107, 339n95, 347n69; Archigram and, 111; Atom project, 112, 113 (fig.); Camden Town Pilot Study, 112; Fun Palace (and Littlewood), 33, 111, 112, 113 (fig.), 114, 182, 191, 245; Potteries Thinkbelt, 275, 328n102 print, 85; electronics and, 23–­31; production, 58 Print (brand), 283, 365n136 printing, 20, 58, 79. See also halftone; offset lithography; rotogravur production, 47, 224, 254; architectural, 229, 237; constituent elements of, 54–­55; faculty,

45, 47; industrial, 45, 50, 197; informatization of, 331n135; mass, 34, 53, 187, 199, 225, 252, 296; non-physical center of, 274; social imaginary for, 229; wartime, 319n93; workings of, 239 programming, 119; as revitalization, 120, 122–­24 projections, 14, 26, 28, 29, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101, 105, 114, 119, 120, 145, 149, 151, 165, 174, 175, 181 203, 219, 233, 241, 242, 250, 259, 266, 288, 291, 298, 305n3, 326n66, 326n71, 326n73; axonometric, 102, 118; mechanical, 12; mobile, 78; multimedia, 25; slide, 24, 73, 75, 97, 107, 253, 270, 271, 325n39 prototypes, 34, 104, 238, 325n39 Prouvé, Jean, 29, 190, 342n9 “Provo” movement, 211 Pueblo buildings, 131 PVC, 218, 219, 220, 227 Pyramid, 99, 257 Quai Malaquais (École des Beaux-Arts, Paris), 341n4, 343n25 Quarmby, Arthur, 191 Quaroni, Ludovico, 356n35 Querrien, Max, 342n8 R. Svoboda & Co., 171 Rabanne, Paco, 170 “Radical Architecture,” 245 Radical Software, 330n123 radomes, 136, 145, 220, 221 (fig.) RAI, 283 Raindance Plug-In Videotape network, 362n106 Rainer, Arnulf, 135, 176 Rainer, Roland, 132, 133, 134 (fig.)

385 INDEX

Ramparts, 173, 339n103 Rancière, Jacques, 328n94 Rauschenberg, Robert, 56, 345n40, 357n51 RCA, 108, 109 Read, Herbert, 52 realism, 12; photographic, 13 redevelopment, 236; suburban, 231 reduction, 145, 242, 243, 244, 256, 269, 270, 278, 353n11 Reed and Barton, 199 Regent Street Polytechnic, 327n83 Reijlander, Oscar, 12 Reinish, Max, 329n110 relationships: complementary, 252; reduction of, 242; symbolic, 225 Rémur, Tanguy de, 232 Renaissance, 165, 198, 315n25 repression, 204–­5, 210–­15 RIBA. See Royal Institute of British Architectur RIBA Journal, 45 Richard Feigen Gallery, 126, 146, 178, 179 (fig.), 335n50 Richter, Hans, 8, 345n40 Rickaby, Tony, 97, 105, 327n86; multisource projection by, 107 (fig.); photographs by, 99; poster by, 98 (fig.), 106 (fig.); technique of, 106 Riesman, David, 343n23 Road to Victory (exhibition), 41 Robbins, David, 316n41 Robinson, Henry Peach, 12 robots, 90, 92, 95, 114 Rodchenko, Alexander, 22, 306n9 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan, 260, 261, 355–­56n35, 359n73 Rome, 245, 247, 250, 356n40 roof systems, 56, 279 Rossi, Aldo, 353n10, 356n35 Rosso, Ricardo, 357n43 386 INDEX

rotogravure, 21–­22, 312n52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 270 Rowe, Colin, 242, 296, 297, 367n3; bricoleur and, 300, 369n26; collage and, 298, 299, 300; Wittkower and, 369n24 Royal College of Art, London, 61, 106, 108 Royal Engineers, 45 Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA), 37, 320n107 Rudolph, Paul, 192 Rühm, Gerhard, 133, 334n33 Ruskin, John, 44 Russo, 245 S-Space/Scuola Separata per l’Architettura Conceptuale Espansa (Separate School for Expanded Conceptual Architecture), 271, 272, 274, 275, 362n107 Saarinen, Eero, 79, 286, 324n25, 330n123 Sabbattini, Nicola, 365n146 Sadler, Simon, 75, 326n77 Safdie, Moshe, 232 St. Helen’s, UK, 115, 123 St. Margarethen, Austria, 148 Saint-Phalle, Nikki de, 172 Salisbury, Martin, 100, 101, 326n66 Samaras, Lucas, 176 Sampson, Peter, 98 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 146 Santi, Danilo, 249 Sartarelli, Stephen, 308n23 satellites, 164, 220 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 205; architectural analogy of, 346n54; associative series and, 346n54 Savings Bank of France, 189 Savioli, Leonardo, 247, 248, 354n19, 355n34, 356n35, 356n38, 357n43; Piper clubs

and, 250, 356–­57n43; studio of, 244–­45, 254, 274; Via Piagentina Apartments, 248, 249 (fig.) scalar manipulation, awareness of, 145 scenario: assembly of, 283–­89; definition of, 286; writing, 366n144 Schein, Ionel, 35 Schilling, Alfons, 135, 334n28 Schindler, Rudolph M., 130, 131, 132, 333n16 Schöffer, Nicolas, 231, 232 science fiction, 47, 51, 195, 364n125 Scientific American, 125 SCIFA, 226 Scott, Felicity D., 30, 243, 361n95 Scott Brown, Denise, 297, 339n94, 367n3; decorated shed and, 65; meaning/­ iconography and, 298 screens, 6, 79, 90, 123, 124, 195; audiovisual, 92; configuration of, 95; media, 87, 94; montage, 97–­98 Screti, 245 sculpture, 97, 137, 222, 332n15 Seitz, William, 314n17 Selection 66 (exhibition), 156 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 135 Sémichon, Jean, 216 (fig.), 346n63 Semiotext(e), 351n125 Serres, Michel, 311n44 Siegert, Bernhard, 19, 284, 311n44; grid and, 313n67; proposal by, 324n29 signs, 215; architecture of, 205 silhouettes, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157 simul-station, 165 Skinner, B. F., 175 slides, 73, 119, 330n116

slogans, 65, 116, 167, 186, 204, 205, 211, 226, 231, 340n113 Smith, Ivor, 97 Smithson, Alison, 35, 39, 40, 53, 194–­95, 313n60, 316n41; Golden Lane Housing, 41, 42, 43, 261, 323n21; House of the Future, 92; New Brutalism and, 34; photomontage by, 43, 51; “Urban Re-identification” grid, 261 Smithson, Peter, 35, 39, 40, 53, 92, 195, 313n60, 320n105; Golden Lane Housing, 41, 42, 43, 261, 323n21; New Brutalism and, 34; photomontage by, 43, 51, 323n21; “Urban Re-identification” grid, 261 Smithson, Robert, 360n86 Smyth, Geoffrey, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 105 social responsibility, 143, 145 socioeconomic rationality, 10 software, 20, 102, 104, 291, 292 Soleri, Paolo, 339n95 Sommerville, Ian, 86 Sottsass, Ettore, Jr., 284, 365n137 sound, 95; stereo, 107 space: architecture-as-­ monumental, 217; concepts of, 223, 248; depictions of, 17; electronic, 162, 164, 331n134; participatory, 29, 244–­53, 270, 274; public, 178; structural shaping of, 230; urban, 195, 202, 238, 248 Space Deck Limited, 54, 55 Space Electronic, 269–­72, 274 space frames, 54, 55, 65, 250, 257 Spagna, Piero, 247 Spalt, Johannes, 333n20 Spazio di Coinvolgimento, 247, 354n24, 362n100 Spiller, Janet, 97 Spinelli, 245 Spur group, 135

Spychalski, Marian, 170 standardization, 43, 45, 226; architectural, 365n141; graphic, 102 Steinberg, Leo, 56, 345n40 Steiner, Hadas, 75, 330n117 Stierli, Martino, 9 Stinco, Antoine, 188, 190, 197, 198, 201, 202 (fig.), 216 (fig.), 217, 218, 219, 342n8, 347n72, 348n80; Aubert and, 204; exhibit and, 218; industrial design and, 202; industrial styling and, 225; montage by, 199; pneumatics and, 226, 228; visual atlas of, 200 Stirling, James, 39, 254 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 356n37 Stone, Edward Durell, 320n104 storyboards, 29, 263, 269, 270, 360n83, 362n101 Straw Market, Florence, 272 Street Farmer, 272 structuralism, 51, 204 structure, 53, 55, 87, 90, 217, 218, 291, 295; audiovisual, 120; cultural, 224; event, 329n112; figurative, 223; geometric, 228; inflatable, 219–­20, 222; lightweight, 191; printed, 334n33; symbolic, 277; tensegrity, 347n70; three-­ dimensional, 7, 12 Structures Gonflables (exhibition), 29, 219, 220 (fig.), 221 (fig.), 222, 226, 347n69 styling, 239, 344n37; industrial, 197–­203, 225; postwar, 103; programs, 344n33 submarines, 151, 163 Sudhalter, Adrian, 306n10 Sunwoo, Irene, 328n103, 353n11, 361n92 Superarchitettura (exhibitions), 247, 257, 352n3, 355n29, 359n70

superproduction/­ superconsumption, society of, 287 Superstudio, 10, 243, 244, 261(fig.), 264–­65 (fig.), 270, 272, 273 (fig.), 276–­77 (fig.), 278, 282 (fig.), 287, 289, 297, 351n1, 352n3, 352n9, 353n14, 354n19, 362n100, 365n138, 366n153; aims of, 244–­45; Ambasz and, 275; ambitions of, 244; Architettura Interplanetaria (film), 362n100; Catalogue of Histograms” (Instogrami d’architettura), 257, 260 (fig.), 268, 269, 284, 285, 353n11, 358n67, 361n94; “Coketown Revisited” (photo­ montage), 260; Continuous Monument, 241, 242, 243 (fig.), 257–­61, 262–­63 (fig.), 263–­69, 279, 280, 352n6, 359n71, 359n75, 360n87; counter­ scenarios of, 285–­86; destruction and, 285; “Discorsi p immagini,” 257, 264 (fig.), 265, 267; emergence of, 247; evasion design and, 358n65; exteriority and, 285; Fundamental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death), 241, 270, 271, 275, 276–­77, 282 (fig.); furniture of, 257; Graz Room, 257, 269; grids and, 261–­63; Grupp 9999 and, 271; Holiday Machine (photo­montage), 253, 255 (fig.), 360n79; “How to Illuminate the Desert,” 267; Journey in the Regions of Reason (Viaggi nelle regioni della ragione), 263, 266; laminates of, 283–­84; lamps of, 267; Luxor furniture, 263; micro-environment and, 364n134; Misura furniture and, 269, 280, 281 (fig.), 284, 387 INDEX

358n67, 361n94; Mobili di primavera, 263; models by, 363n117; photomontages by, 241, 244, 263, 268–­69; Quaderna series, 361n94; situationist movement and, 361n95; “Superarchitecture” manifesto, 241; Supersurface: An Alternate Model of Life on Earth (exhibition), 242, 274–­83, 286, 287, 288, 360n78, 364n132; surface-matrix of, 285; systems thinking of, 365n141; Tavola Sinottica, 358 (fig.), 358n65; techniques and, 364n129; Twelve Cautionary Tales, 241 Superstudio Archive, 358n68, 358n69 surrealism, 37, 134, 136, 147, 195 Sutherland, Ron, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107 (fig.), 326n66 Svobodair, 171, 174, 339n95 symbolism, 52, 160, 170, 173 Szeeman, Harold, 329n112 Tafuri, Manfredo, 242, 243, 309n25, 350n120, 352n4; avant-garde and, 11, 308n24; on Eco, 356n37; montage and, 10, 308n23 Tamms, Friedrich, 147 Tange, Kenzō, 3, 295 Tati, Jacques, 203 Tatler, The, 86 Tatlin, Vladimir, 253 Taut, Bruno, 242 Taylor, Peter, 323n15 TC 7 television studio, BBC, 119 Team 10: 180, 261 technics/ techniques, 117, 224, 226, 239; cultural, 7, 19, 70, 79, 148; imagining, 118; montage, 18, 24–­25, 25–­26, 74, 122; pure, 226; transferring, 72 technological atlases, 135–­39 388 INDEX

technological forces, 299, 300 technology, 3, 26, 37, 70, 75, 135, 143, 215, 219, 222, 224, 226, 237, 238, 253, 256, 266, 281, 282, 291, 293, 294, 295, 300, 320n104, 336n55, 336n55, 336n58, 361n94; abstraction of, 61; analog/digital, 292, 310n35; architecture and, 59–­61, 63–­66, 142, 254, 335n38; audiovisual, 329n107; building, 45, 188; clip-on, 69; communication, 122, 172; consumer, 123; ­cultural, 19, 23, 31, 257, 259, 284, 285; demountable, 238; do-it-yourself, 229; electronic, 24, 28, 74; environmental, 212, 217; filmic, 292; iconog­raphy of, 254, 278; industrial, 210; inflatable, 215; mental accommodation to, 60, 72; monumentality and, 257; movement of, 14; organized, 296; outmoded, 114; photographic, 292; photo­mechanical, 294; pneumatic, 222; as potential, 60; programming, 26; science and, 67; sex and, 50; social implications of, 230; space age, 265; spin-off, 69; time and, 296; tradition and, 59; wonders of, 61 technomorphism, 253–­54, 256, 359n71 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 281, 364n125 telecommunications, 25, 123, 172, 330n123; electrical, 74, 122, 288; global, 127; satellite, 220 Telefunken radios, 198 television, 73, 161, 172, 330n123; monitoring/re-projection and, 119; rise of, 30

Telstar, 338n83; intercontinental discussion by, 165; international transmission by, 167 (fig.) Tetrahedral City, 146 texture, 6, 13, 14, 21, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 58, 59, 102, 115, 192, 205, 215, 248, 299 theoretical problem, 237, 239 Thiersch, Friedrich von, 12, 13, 14, 15 (fig.), 268 This Is Tomorrow (exhibition), 41, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 69, 80, 320n100; catalog for, 58 (fig.), 83 (fig.), 81; influence of, 323n12; installation for, 55 (fig.), 56 (fig.) Three Spaces (exhibition), 92 Todt Organization, 336n55 Tonka, Hubert, 188, 203, 204, 205, 206–­7 (fig.), 208–­9 (fig.), 210, 213, 213 (fig.), 214, 222, 342n8, 348n76, 350n114, 351n125; IS and, 346n59; Utopie and, 211 Top of the Pops, 97 Toraldo di Francia, Cristiano, 241, 250, 255 (fig.), 256, 258, 280, 355n29, 355n30, 358n52, 359n71, 359n75, 361n95, 363n113, 363n119, 365n136; “Dall’industria al tecno­morfismo,” 253; Holiday M ­ achine and, 360n79; petition by, 247; self-critical reflection and, 254; thesis of, 270 Tottenham Court Road, 75, 87 Touraine, Alain, 18, 348n88 Tout!, 340n113 Toynbee, Arnold, 338n80 tradition: regional, 298; technology and, 59; Viennese, 158 transfer, 72, 79, 120, 154; technology, 6, 17, 69, 70, 87, 93, 284, 295, 296

transformation, 31, 129, 130, 133, 238, 296, 332n6; aesthetic, 224; cultural, 296; intellectual, 135; moments of, 186, 187, 215; social, 285, 286; urban, 229 transmission, 11, 20, 23, 78, 119, 163, 274; electronic, 160, 166; photomechanical, 14 transmission towers, 180 transportation, 8, 68, 90, 172 Trigon (exhibitions), 257, 260, 266, 268, 269, 286, 359n71, 361n89 Trini, Tommaso, 252 Tronti, Mario, 243, 269, 270, 353n10 Tschumi, Bernard, 242 Turnbull, William, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62 (fig.) Turner, Fred, 41, 315n29 typology, 14, 42, 46, 59, 175, 236, 237, 247, 271, 355n34 Tyrwitt, Jacqueline, 338n80 Uecker, Gunther, 98 UFO. See Urboeffimer Ugo La Pietra, 272, 274, 275 UIA. See International Union of Architect UNESCO, 348n82 Unit Delta Plus, 99 United States Air Force, 256–­57 United States Department of Defense, 275 United States Pavilion, 186, 279 United States Strategic Command, 142 Unités Pedagogiques (UP), 341n4 University of Florence, 271, 284; Architecture Faculty of, 29, 241, 244, 245, 247, 248 UNURI, 354n26 UP6: 351n125 urban condition, image of, 215 urban society, architecture for, 237

urbanism, 345n43, 350n108; contemporary, 203, 230; ­industrialized consumer, 237 urbanization, total, 236, 359n71 Urboeffimeri (UFO), 245, 271, 272, 274, 353n9, 362n103 USS Enterprise, 151, 335n47 USS Forrestal, 3, 5, 125, 129, 149, 151, 335n47, 336n58 USSR in Construction (Lissitzky and Rodchenko), 22 utopia, 239, 298 Utopie, 29, 185, 215, 216, 217, 220 (fig.), 221 (fig.), 229, 233, 339n95, 341n2, 344n38, 347n73, 350n113; architects of, 195; “Architecture as a Theoretical Problem,” 22, 185, 186, 188 (fig.), 230, 231, 232 (fig.), 234; critique of, 187, 236; “De Gaulle über Halles” (photo­ montage), 231, 234 (fig.); Des raisons de l’architecture, 341n3; demolition and, 194; ephemeral and, 195; exhibition by, 222; La logique de l’urbanisme, 342n7, 350n109; “La répression” (Tonka and Lourau), 204, 206–­7 (fig.), 208–­9 (fig.), 210, 211, 212, 213, 213 (fig.); montages of, 232, 235, 237; pneumatic technology and, 222; Propos sur le Logis, 342n8; rhetoric of, 226; social forces and, 187; structures of, 249; task of, 185 Utopie, 195, 197, 199, 204, 211, 212, 218, 345n43, 349n101, 351n125 Utzon, Jørn, 139, 334n32 Vallourec, 232 Van Eck, Caroline, 310n36 Van Eyck, Aldo, 139 VanDerBeek, Stan, 79 Varèse, Edgard, 79

Venturi, Robert, 297, 339n94, 367n3; decorated shed and, 65; meaning/iconography and, 298 Verne, Jules, 297 Versorgung, 173, 174 Vertical Assembly Building (NASA), 164, 253, 254, 264, 267, 358n56 Verwandlung, 129, 332n5, 332n6 Vesnin, Alexander, 329n114 Vesnin, Victor, 329n114 Vézelay, Paule, 319n86 Vian, Boris, 228 video: digital, 367n3; rise of, 30 Vidler, Anthony, 30 Vienna, 1, 26, 28, 127, 130, 147, 166, 174, 176, 179, 334n36, 336n55; influence of, 133–­35 Villeglé, Jacques, 314n17 vinyl, 204, 212, 218, 219 Virno, Paolo, 243 vision, 73, 105, 123, 178, 193, 305n3; creative, 46, 47; hier­ archical, 38; pastoral, 149; prospectivist, 345n43 Visionary Architecture (exhibition), 146 visual continuity, 54, 264 visual tangibility, desire for, 44 visual-verbal manifesto, 130 visualization, 37, 78, 150, 293; composite, 20; historical temporality of, 31 Vlady, Marina, 213–­14 Voelcker, John, 53 voice-over, 244, 278, 361n99, 364n128 Vostell, Wolf, 340n113 Votivkirche, 176 VU, 22, 22 (fig.) Wachsmann, Konrad, 253, 256–­57, 257 Wagner, Otto, 133 Walker Art Center, 352n8 389 INDEX

Walters, Roger, 45, 46, 47, 66 Warburg, Aby, 11 Warhol, Andy, 97, 162, 178, 251, 357n45 Warner, Charles H., Jr., 117 (fig.) Warner Leeds, 117 (fig.) Wasiuta, Mark, 363n115 Webb, Michael, 74, 81, 91–­92, 93 (fig.), 245, 325n44, 327n83 Weber, Paul, 309n32 Webster, Clive, 325n52 Weekend Telegraph, 92 Werkbund, German, 16, 40, 130 Wesselmann, Tom, 172 West Pier (Brighton), 98, 114, 122 Wheeler Ranch, 287 Whitechapel Gallery, London, 53, 54, 56, 83, 320n98 Whiteley, Nigel, 327n84 Wiener, Oswald, 133, 175, 176 Wiener Gruppe, 133, 134, 334n33

390 INDEX

Wiener Stadthalle, 133, 134 (fig.) Wiesbaden Kurhaus, 12, 14, 15 (fig.) Wigley, Mark, 75, 101, 337n74 Willats, Stephen, 98, 101 Wirkung, 170, 339n92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 339n93 Wittkower, Rudolf, 40, 299, 315n25, 369n24 Wolman, Guy, 346n58, 351n121 Woodrow, Taylor, 321n111, 320–­21n112, 323n17 Woodstock, 120 Woolands department store, 90, 92, 324n33 Woolmark logotype, 210 World Game, 275 World Urbanism Day, 342n7 Wright, Edward, 54, 57, 58, 65–­66, 65 (fig.), 81, 321n116; typog­ raphy and, 321n117

Xenakis, Iannis, 79 Yale Art and Architecture Building, 192 Yale Center for British Art, 317n57 Yale School of Architecture, 297 YESCO signs, 298 Youngblood, Gene, 281, 287, 364n125; noosphere and, 283, 365n151; society of, 282–­83 Zenghelis, Elia, 242 Zentralvereinigung der Architekten Oesterreichs, 335n44 Zero group, 98 Zevi, Bruno, 359n70 Ziggurat, 245, 272 Zimmerman, Claire, 9, 30, 39

CRAIG BUCKLEY is assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, where he teaches modern and contemporary architecture.