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Pocket Reference Library Assemblage’s Pocket Autonomy Dictionary NEW EDITION A handy, concise guide to 1 English word

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Page 1: Autonomy Pocket Dictionary

Pocket Reference Library

Assemblage’s

Pocket AutonomyDictionary

NEW EDITIONA handy, concise guide to

1 English word

Page 2: Autonomy Pocket Dictionary

Contents

1 Mallory Taub Introduction

6 Methodology

8 Unabridged List of Autonomy Articles in Assemblage 1 - 41

19 Autonomy Dictionary

46 Index of Dictionary Entries

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Introduction

This book is a dictionary of the word, “autonomy,” as it was used throughout the forty one issues of Assemblage in discourse about the autonomy of the discipline of architecture. On a general level, autonomy in reference to architecture relates to a belief in that there is something distinct about the field of architecture that is not shared by any other fields. The concept of autonomy in architecture has been highly contested in the history of architectural discourse. One extreme of the debate is framed by Peter Eisenman, who believes in the complete autonomy of architecture. By eliminating context and suject, Eisenmen reduces the essence of architecture to points, lines, and planes, all distinct to the discipline.

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Introduction

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The articles written throughout Assemblage are typically variations on this theme, more often than not asserting some level of architectural autonomy, but not egating the essence of architecture to points, lines, and planes. The extreme of the other side of this debate views architects as civil servants, as interdisciplinary actors whose primary concerns are environmental sustainability, the context of the site, function, and consideration of the users. The views represented in Assemblage all consider architects to be something more than this, to be experts in something within the field, thereby furthering this discourse of autonomy in architecture.

The historical significance and development of the idea of autonomy can be found within the readings published in Assemblage. In Assemblage 13, R.E. Somol’s article, “No Place Like Home,” traces the discussion to the late 1960s with the neo-avant garde’s aversion to a direct translation of function into architectural form. Of this time, Somol writes, “(W)hile other cultural producers…were returning to strategies of the historical avant-garde in order to

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Introduction

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deaestheticize their already high art practices, architecture found itself in the relatively singular position of having both to elevate its discipline and to question its authority… The architectural neo-avant-garde—unlike that of the other arts—was compelled to articulate the art/life dichotomy, which it accomplished largely through the double-edged discourse of ‘autonomy’.”

In a later issue, Assemblage 36, Somol continues a historical account of the autonomy discussion in his article, “Still Crazy After All These Years.” He cites Colin Rowe’s solicitation of connections across history and “largely optico-conceptual language” as one of the greatest influences for this discussion in the postmodern area. According to Somol, this led to two divergent stances: “the precendential (the quest for disciplinary autonomy via typology and context) and the conceptual (autonomy through process).”

In his editorial in Assemblage 30, K. Michael Hays highlights influence of Rowe, as well as Tafuri, in theory that promoted “the possibility of converting

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Introduction

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its (architecture’s) autonomy from a historical imposition into a counterideological resistance: architecture’s social power resided not in its communication with society but in its ability to resist society’s values through specific, technical procedures.” It was this generation that Assemblage appealed to when it began publication in 1986. In this article, Hays highlights reasons why autonomy was such a key issue at the time. First, this allowed for a furthering and broadening of a discussion on cultural criticism within the framework of poststructuralism. In addition, discourse moved beyond examining pieces of architecture as objects and turned towards considering architecture itself as a subject. Hays writes, “The apparatus of autonomy – whose concerns are mainly synchronic, synthetic, and projective – was not abandoned so much as folded into various discourses of context and exteriority…architecture’s specific forms, operations, and practices could now more clearly be seen as producing concepts whose ultimate horizon of effect lay outside of architecture ‘proper,’ situated in amore general sociocultural field.”

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Introduction

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As the editor of Assemblage, Hays reflects on the positions taken throughout the life of the publication and concludes that architecture is autonomous, but that it is impossible to separate an architectural object from its sociohistorical context. Theory emncompasses the totality of architecture, contributing the idea that social, historical, and ideological frameworks are embedded within architecture.

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Methodology

The research for this book began by searching through every article published in Assemblage 1 – 41 for the word, “autonomy.” The complete results of this research are documented in the “Unabridged List of Autonomy Articles in Assemblage 1 – 41.” The articles in which “autonomy” was written are listed in chronological order under headings of the respective issues in which they were published. To the left of each listing, there is a number in parenthesis which denotes the number of times “autonomy” appears in the article. For example, “(x3)” means that “autonomy” was used in the article three times.

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In the “Unabridged List of Autonomy Articles in Assemblage 1 – 41,” the articles listed in gray are those in which “autonomy” was used but not as part of discourse concerning the autonomy of the discipline of architecture. The articles listed in black are the ones from which the dictionary entries are derived. Each author of the articles written in black can be found in alphabetical order in the dictionary. For each entry in the dictionary, I have attempted to summarize each writer’s definition of autonomy. Each entry also includes a list of the articles published in Assemblage by that author that discuss autonomy of the discipline of architecture. I have also given an exerpt from each author from his or her articles in Assemblage on this topic. For articles that included images as references for the authors arguments, I have included the original images published in Assemblage. The architects of the projects shown in these images, as well as those referenced in the exerpts, are included in the “Index of Dictionary Entries” found in the back of this book.

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Unabridged ListAssemblage 1 - 41

Assemblage 1, October 1986

(x9) Critical Conventionalism in Architecture by Stanford Anderson

(x1) Premises for the Resumption of the Discussion of Typology by Werner Oechslin

(x1) Museum for Roman Artifacts, Merida, Spain by Rafael Moneo

Assemblage 2, February 1987

(x0)

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Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

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Assemblage 3, July 1987 (x0)

Assemblage 4, October 1987

(x1) Le Corbusier and Photography by Beatriz Colomina

Assemblage 5, February 1988

(x1) Postmodernism and Structrualism: A Retrospective Glance by Alan Colquhoun

(x16) Across the Texts by Carlo Olmo

Assemblage 6, June 1988

(x1) Benjamin the Scrivener by Richard Sieburth

(x2) The Disease of the Domicile by Georges Teyssot

Assemblage 7, October 1988 (x0)

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Assemblage 8, February 1989

(x6) Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism by Mary McLeod

(x1) Changing Agendas: Architecture and Politics in Contemporary Italy by Dennis P. Doordan

(x2) Postmodernism and Antimodernism in Contemporary British Architecture by Michael Rustin

Assemblage 9, June 1989

(x1) Losing Face: Notes on the Modern Museum by Anthony Vidler

(x3) The Hidden and the Apparent: Comments on the Work of Jacues Herzog and Pierre de Meuron by Dorothy Huber

Assemblage 10, October 1988

(x5) Piranesi’s “Campo Marzio”: An Experimental Design by Stanley Allen

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

10

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Assemblage 11, December 1989

(x2) Nuclear Architecture or Rabulous Architecture or Tragic Architecture or Dionysian Architecture by Mark C. Taylor

(x1) Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory by Louis Martin

Assemblage 12, August 1990

(x2) Between the Lines: Extension to the Berlin Museum, with the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind

(x5) The Spectacle of the City of Paris from 25bis rue Franklin by Martin Bressani

Assemblage 13, December 1990

(x1) Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles by Zeynep Celik and Leila Kinney

(x13) No Place like Home: Domesticating Assemblages by R.E. Somol

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

11

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Assemblage 14, April 1991

(x0)

Assemblage 15, August 1991

(x1) Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplinging of Architecture by Mark Wigley

(x1) The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of “Raumgestaltung” by Mitchell W. Scharzer and August Schmarsow

(x7) The Legacy of German Neoclassicism and Biedermeier: Behrens, Tessenow, Loos, and Mies by Stanford Anderson

(x11) Re: The Politics of Formal Autonomy by Daniel Sherer

Assemblage 16, December 1991

(x1) Given Domain: Mockbee-Coker-Howorth, “Breaking the Cycle of Poverty” by John Biln

Assemblage 17, April 1992

(x2) Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society by Fredric Jameson and Michael Speaks

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

12

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(x8) Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” by Hilde Heynen

Assemblage 18, August 1992

(x0)

Assemblage 19, December 1992

(x3) Transformational Constructions (For Example: Adult Day) by Mark Rakatansky

(x2) Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies by Greg Lynn

Assemblage 20, April 1993

(x0)

Assemblage 21, August 1993

(x3) Archtiecture after Auschwitz by Gillian Rose

(x1) The Camouflage House by Dauglas Garofalo

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

13

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Assemblage 22, December 1993

(x0)

Assemblage 23, April 1994

(x5) Pathetic Substitutes by Bruce Robbins

Assemblage 24, August 1994

(x1) Mi casa es su casa by Margaret Crawford

Assemblage 25, December 1994

(x0)

Assemblage 26, April 1995

(x1) Perverse Coupling by John Biln

Assemblage 27, August 1995

(x1) Politics and Pastoralism by Sanford Kwinter

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

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(x9) Architecture Theory, Media, and Question of Audience by K. Michael Hays

(x1) Dazed and Confused by Stan Allen

Assemblage 28, December 1995

(x1) Sacrifice and the Garden: Watelet’s “Essai sur les jardins” and the Space of the Pictresque by Sylvia Lavin and Claude-Henri Watelet

(x2) Tafuri’s Renaissance: Architecture, Representation, Transgression by Daniel Sherer

Assemblage 29, April 1996

(x0)

Assemblage 30, August 1996

(x12) Editorial by K. Michael Hays and Catherine Ingraham

Assemblage 31, December 1996

(x1) Hooked on Kracauer by Juliet Koss

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

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Assemblage 32, April 1997

(x0)

Assemblage 33, August 1997

(x1) The Architecture of Architecture Education by Robert Segrest

Assemblage 34, December 1997

(x1) Modern Architecture and the Ideology of Influence by Paula Young Lee

Assemblage 35, April 1998

(x1) Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s “History of Architecture” by Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu

(x1) Public Art and the Spaces of Democracy by Pamela M. Lee

Assemblage 36, August 1998

(x2) Still Crazy After All These Years by R.E. Somol

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

16

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Assemblage 37, December 1998

(x3) The City as the Object of Architecture by Mario Gandelsonas

Assemblage 38, April 1999

(x1) Subject: Greg Lynn by Mark Rakatansky

(x2) Not Architecture but Evidence That It Exists: A Note on Lauretta Vinciarelli’s Watercolors by K. Michael Hays

Assemblage 39, August 1999

(x6) Pollock’s Promise: Toward an Abstract Expressionist Architecture by Eric Lum

(x2) Of by Nana Last

Assemblage 40, December 1999

(x2) Spot Check: A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting by Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

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Assemblage 41, April 2000

(x1) Bona Fide Modernity by Preston Scott Cohen and Robert Levit

(x1) [Article by James D. Herbert] by Mark James D. Herbert

(x1) Architecture Dissolving? by Detlef Mertins

(x1) The Ends of Theory: From the Editor’s Forward to the “Assemblage” Reader by Daniel Bertrand Monk

(x1) [Article by Joan Ockman] by Joan Ockman

(x1) War on the Archive by Felicity Scott

(x1) Agitate for Architecture by Henry Urbach

(x3) Critical Reflections by Sarah Whiting

(x22) Autonomy and the Will to the Critical by Peter Eisenman

(x1) In the Wake of “Assemblage” by R.E. Somol

Unabridged List, Assemblage 1 - 41

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AutonomyDictionary

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Allen

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architectural autonomy creates a state of distraction, which is not problematic because distraction is inherent within the field of architecture.

Origin:Allen, Stanley. “Piranesi’s ‘Campo Marzio’: An Experimental Design.” Assemblage 10 (1989): 70-109.

Allen, Stanley. “Dazed and Confused.” Assemblage 27 (1995): 47-54.

Exerpt from “Dazed and Confused” :“Now if we agree that distraction destabilizes artifacts by calling into question the autonomy of architecture’s subjects, then, in fact, something like what Eisenman describes could be a productive strategy...(I)n practice, Eisenman’s objects function according to a logic of defamiliarization, declaring their difference from what exists and soliciting a hermeneutic reading whereby the formal operations of design (the operations of the designer as author) - the shears, superpositions, or foldings - are intended to be read back from the final state of the artifact. And while this architecture may desire a hermeneutic subject, under a mediated reality, what it gets is a distracted subject who reads the architecture as a sign, not very much differently than the projected information on a Jean Nouvel façade.”

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Anderson

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is semi-autonomous in that its conventions can relate to its own disciplinary traditions, while it must critically question its own conventions within a larger cultural context in which its inhabitants live.

Origin:1. Anderson, Stanford. “Critical Conventionalism in Architecture.” Assemblage 1 (1986): 6-23.

2. Anderson, Stanford. “The Legacy of German Neoclassicism and Biedermeier:Behrens, Tessenow, Loos, and Mies.” Assemblage 15 (1991): 62-87.

Exerpt from “Critical Conventionalism in Architecture” :“Any social practice, such as architecture, takes place in a field of overlapping, often competing conventions. Sound practice recognizes the quasi-autonomy of these conventions and thus their claims on us for their own beauty and order and for their possible perpetuation. But sound practice also requires that these conventions recognize limits and discover potentials within their domain of practice. Conventions and practice criticize one another. They thus can sustain a reasoned and empirically based practice within societies that maintain discourse.”

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Anderson

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Viennese Succession BuildingJoseph Maria OlbrichVienna, 1899

Anderson is critical of Alois Riegle’s embracement of the autonomy of the Kunstwollen, expressed here on the façade in the quotation, “For the age its art; for art its freedom.”

Steiner HouseAdolf LoosVienna, 1910

Anderson supports Loos’ critical conventionalism. Architecture can be autonomous when it comes to form, but must accommodate the heterogeneity of cultural life of the times.

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Cohen

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is not completely autonomous because it is always subject to the changing demands of modernity.

Origin:Cohen, Preston Scott, and Robert Levit. “Bona Fide Modernity.” Assemblage 41 (2000): 18.

Exerpt from “Bona Fide Modernity”:“The autonomy of form “discovered” by Aldo Rossi, along with all the erudite expeditions into architectural language of the ensuing decades, now lie beneath a cloud of suspicion...Now architecture seeks to be determined by “performative” standards: traffic patterns, solar patterns, zoning regulations, and the operations of programs and scrutinized sociabilities. By establishing itself as a porous field, it opens itself to the denouements of city life. Architecture may now give rise to strange forms but not for form’s sake - neither on behalf of those intellectual confections of erudite syntax nor those distillations of history’s typological proprieties.”

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Colquhoun

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Function relates architecture to the context in which it was built and to outside factors, but yet its form should be informed by its own formal traditions.

Origin:Colquhoun, Alan. “Postmodernism and Structrualism: A Retrospective Glance.” Assemblage 5 (1988): 6-15.

Exerpt from “Postmodernsim and Structrualism: A Retrospective Glance” :“There is no direct translation between function and form. Their relation is always mediated by custom and history. The architectural imagination should be free to choose from the entire cause of architectural forms without being constrained by a priori theories about the dictates of the spirit of the age. On the other hand, we should not think that this choice is unlimited. Architecture derives its meaning from the circumstances of its creation; and this implies that what is external to architecture—what can broadly be called its set of functions—is of vital importance…Structure and function are false opposites; they must be reconciled.”

Casa dello studenteGiorgio GrassiChieti, 1976

Colquhoun cites the work of Grassi who critiqued modern capitalism by showing that architecture can be autonomous by differentiating between architectural values and the political status quo.

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Eisenman

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au•to•no•my n 1 : By eliminating context and subject, architecture is reduced to it’s own elements: points, lines, and planes. Criticality is a manifestation of the autonomy of the discipline of architecture. By completely divorcing function from architecture, the concept of the autonomy of architecture is pushed to its maximum condition.

Origin:Eisenman, Peter. “Autonomy and the Will to the Critical.” Assemblage 41 (2000): 90-91.

Exerpt from “Autonomy and the Will to the Critical” :“Singularity does not displace the thing itself—a column, for example—nor deny its usefulness, but rather, denies that which formerly legitimated the thing’s being—the sign of the column’s structuring function. It is this possible singularity that evolves from the cutting off of the sign function—in other words, architecture’s sedimented history as meaning—that begins to suggest architecture’s autonomy. While traditionally any project of autonomy was primarily formal, autonomy is being proposed here as a means of unmotivating the architectural sign; that is, as a means of cutting the sign off from its previous value in function and meaning. This autonomy is neither formal nor semiotic per se; rather, it opens the internal processes of architecture to their own internal possibilities.”

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Eisenman

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House IIIPeter EisenmanProject, 1970

Eisenman’s axonometric drawings are illustrative of his theory of complete architectural autonomy wherin architecture’s expression is limited to its own formal vocabulary and is not influenced by any other considerations.

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Gandelsonas

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is autonomous in that its projects have the most impact when architects think they can restructure the city, rather than when they think that the city is only subject to economic and political forces.

Origin:Gandelsonas, Mario. “The City as the Object of Architecture.” Assemblage 37 (1998): 128-144.

Exerpt from “The City as the Object of Architecture” :“Modernist architecture’s notion of objet-type starts to weaken the creative subject with the idea of an anonymous collective subject. But perhaps as important as that is the idea of an autonomy of architectural form, of an architectural signifier that locates the architect as its subject, as determined by it and not determining it; in other terms, the site of production becomes reduced and passive.”

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Hays

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is autonomous, but it is impossible to separate an architectural object from its sociohistorical context. Theory encompasses the totality of architecture, contributing the idea that social, historical, and ideological frameworks are embedded within architecture.

Origin:Hays, K. Michael. “Architecture Theory, Media, and Question of Audience.” Assemblage 27 (1995): 41-46.

Hays, K. Michael. “Editorial.” Assemblage 30 (1996): 6-11.

Hays, K. Michael. “Not Architecture but Evidence That It Exists: A Note on Lauretta Vinciarelli’s Watercolors.” Assemblage 38 (1999): 48-57.

Exerpt from “Editorial”:“Any theory that talks about architecture only, that does not relate architecture to the larger social, material field, is utterly useless. At the same time, any theory that does not articulate the concrete specificity and semiautonomy of architecture’s codes and operations misses a major medium of social practice. The two parts of this assertion - that architecture is autonomous and heteronomous - are not contradictory; they are, however, dialectical and I, for one, maintain a commitment to dialects, even though I understand that it is not with-out certain problems. For dialectics has always sought to invent not just syntheses but genuinely new ways of thinking, however tentative, however worrisome.”

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Heynen

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Boundaries between autonomous and non-autonomous architecture are blurry, but there are elements of both within the field of architecture. Architects act autonomously in the design process but are also subject to outside factors that affect the outcome.

Origin:Heynen, Hilde. “Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory.’” Assemblage 17 (1992): 78-91.

Exerpt from “Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’”:“(A) strict autonomy has to be assigned to the architectural artistic process as a process. As a discipline that specializes in articulating space in order to give shape to people’s living, architecture is unmistakably autonomous. Design is not simply the management of heteronomous principles such as functional or constructive requirements, psychological needs of the consumers, representational demands, and the like. There is always an autonomous moment in the design process in which an architect is occupied with architecture as such. At the same time, this irreducible architectural moment cannot possibly be detached from all the other factors determining the final result presented in the form of a building or some other artifact.”

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Heynen

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Project for the Peter’s SchoolHannes Meyer, Hans WittwerCompetition entry, 1926

Huber shows this as an example of Herzog and de Meuron’s expression of “internal architectonic reality” as an aspect of the autonomy of architecture.

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Huber

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is autonomous but this does not mean it is inaccessible. Architecture can communicate and cultural experiences can echo in the work itself.

Origin:Huber, Dorothy. “The Hidden and the Apparent: Comments on the Work of Jacues Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.” Assemblage 9 (1989): 114-117.

Exerpt from “The Hidden and the Apparent: Comments on the Work of Jacues Herzog and Pierre de Meuron”:“In discussing their position in today’s architectual scene, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron refer to...that time, around 1970, (when) architectural education in European schools was largely determined by disciplines related to architecture (from economics across the technical fields to sociology and psychology), which to a certain extent had established the theories of the new architecture as constitutive of the social legitimation of architects. The change that subsequently took place…could be described as the new formation of a value system that would be registered by the architectural project: rather than the value analytically won by the instruments of the related disciplines, the appeal would be to an “internal architectonic reality,” the insistence on the autonomy of architecture.”

Project for a marketplaceJacques Herzog, Pierre de MeuronBasel, 1979

Huber shows this as an example of Herzog and de Meuron’s expression of “internal architectonic reality” as an aspect of the autonomy of architecture.

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Koolhaas

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Rather than viewing architecture as autonomous, it is more relevant to consider that form does not have to follow function and that there is not a prescribed definition of the connection between a building and its image.

Origin:Koolhaas, Rem and Sarah Whiting. “Spot Check: A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting.” Assemblage 40 (1999): 36-55.

Exerpt from “Spot Check: A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting”:

Sarah Whiting: “So you see it as a false or misdirected desire to maintain architectural autonomy?”

Rem Koolhaas: “That was my argument. I saw a hidden claim to a kind of justification, mystifica- tion, and legitimization and for a kind of strictly architectural task that has proved the undoing of so much architectural thinking. Another kind of issue - and that was more Van Berkel than the others - was that he really claimed a kind of vast operational competence or effectiveness for the work. That, for me, is simply the return of a very rigid form-follows-function kind of reading: the opposite of operational. To be opera- tional today, you have to abstain from large claims, including being operational.”

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Lum

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au•to•no•my n 1 : There are autonomous elements of architecture but the discipline cannot conceal the influences of and similarities to those of painting

Origin:Lum, Eric. “Pollock’s Promise: Toward an Abstract Expressionist Architecture.” Assemblage 39 (1999): 62-93.

Exerpt from “Pollock’s Promise: Toward an Abstract Expressionist Architecture”:“In the postwar period, it is architecture that increasingly aims toward both a real and conceptual flatness, toward a degree-zero condition of optical and formal transparency that cannot be actualized, leaving instead an object that appears merely vacuous, empty. Meanwhile, abstract painting, working toward absolute two-dimensionality, finds itself faced with the reverse phenomena of edge, depth, space, and tactility. The Roman still life displays reality only to defy it, whereas abstraction seeks escape in the fictional autonomy of pure form. Perhaps this is also why, through drawing, architects have found it so easy to occupy this terrain, from the time of Alberti onward, in reducing architecture to an essence of lines, planes, and symbols.”

Views of a Jackson Pollack ExhibitBetty Parsons GalleryNew York, 1950

Lum shows this painting as part of his discussion about the connection between painting and architecture.

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McLeod

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Autonomy in architecture cannot be reduced to a formal essence. Architecture is never independent of the commercial society in which it operates and is therefore always subject to economic and political influences.

Origin:McLeod, Mary. “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism.” Assemblage 8 (1989): 22-59.

Exerpt from “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism”:“Although modern architects were frequently engaged in highly sophisticated, abstract formal explorations, modernism in architecture was never commonly conceived…as implying autonomy of the discipline. The modern movement was seen by both its early practitioners and its historians as intrinsically involving new techniques, mass culture, and a broader social role. And if postmodern advocates have produced their own more reductive, monolithic version of modern architecture, it is one that asserts, even exaggerates, the modern movement’s social concerns. Thus the commonly assumed polarity of modernism/artistic autonomy and postmodernism/mass culture (cultural “contamination”) simply does not hold. Indeed, postmodern currents, whether historicist or poststructuralist, can be viewed as a return to architecture as a primarily formal and artistic pursuit, one that rejects the social engagement of the modern movement; with few exceptions, the eclecticism and pluralism of post-modern architecture have operated almost entirely in the formal sphere. And yet, in delineating this retreat to traditional boundaries, it is also important to acknowledge architecture’s more visible cultural role.”

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Mertins

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au•to•no•my n 1 : Autonomy in architecture is not possible given the current disolvement of the field into varioius practices, each with distinct ideas of what makes up the discipline and how it relates to art, craft, tradition, technology, and business.

Origin:Mertins, Detlef. “Architecture Dissolving?” Assemblage 41 (2000): 52.

Exerpt from “Architecture Dissolving?”:“Focusing on the technical support for the multiplic- ity, complexity, and contingency of emerging con- structive practices rearticulates architecture as a medium no longer quite itself but now compounded, hybrid, and self-differing - already incorporated in and immanent to the material processes of world for- mation. Reopening the question of the architecture of architecture in this way avoids both the codifica- tion and transcendentalist claims associated with the discourse of architectural autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s against which the Assemblage generation quite rightly reacted.”

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Nalbantoglu

36

au•to•no•my n 1 : The writing of architectural history should engage the supposition of the cultural and disciplinary boundaries of architecture, a practice even more important when considering post-colonial architecture that has often been designated as outside of the canon of architecture

Origin:Baydar, Gulsum, and Nalbantoglu. “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘History of Architecture.’” Assemblage 35 (1998): 6-17.

Exerpt from “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘History of Architecture’”:“Architecture, as a fixed category, becomes a burden.”

History of ArchitectureSir Banister FletcherNew York, © 1896

Nalbantoglu looks at Sir Banister Fletcher’s writings on the history of architecture to question the perceived Western canonical conception of what is inside and outside architecture.

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Ockman

37

au•to•no•my n 1 : Architectural theory has developed to the point of being almost autonomous, but would benefit from being deconstructed.

Origin:Ockman, Joan. “[Article by Joan Ockman].” Assemblage 41 (2000): 61.

Exerpt:“Manfredo Tafuri (read) the white architecture of the New York Five and the neorationalism of the Italian Tendenza as manifestations of an architecture dans le boudoir, a last-ditch attempt to construct myths of architecture’s potency and autonomy in order to ward off the anguish provoked by its increasingly apparent status as a “negligible object” and their own marginality.”

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Olmo

38

au•to•no•my n 1 : According to the texts of Aldo Rossi examined in this article, architecture’s autonomy is based on the ability to evaluate the legitimacy of a design in reference to architecture’s enduring formal typologies.

Origin:Olmo, Carlo. “Across the Texts.” Assemblage 5 (1988): 90-121.

Exerpt from “Across the Texts” :“…a city more and better defined in its urban morphologies and in its constructional typologies and whose constructional typologies and whose construction could only emerge from a simultaneously quantitative and serial study of the architectural and urban heritage, of the area where intervention was to take place. Such was the crux around which gravitated many of the problems for which Rossi would eventually find very different solutions…(including) a rapport between knowledge and intervention, increasingly confined to the architectural heritage…to suggest architecture’s autonomy from the social realm; a historicity of places based upon endurance and on minimal disorientations, defined by continuities and not by formal or symbolic exigencies.”

Gallaratese HosingAldo RossiMilan, 1969-1973

Olmo explains autonomy in terms of Rossi’s theory of typology as an essence of architecture.

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Robbins

39

au•to•no•my n 1 : Since architecture plays a role in constructing social space, it cannot view itself as fully autonomous, distict, or closed off.

Origin:Robbins, Bruce. “Pathetic Substitutes.” Assemblage 23 (1994): 86-91.

Exerpt:“Nothing could be less autonomous than architecture: could we, I wonder, read this as a kind of boast, a claim to social significance registered not by our degree of proud separation, as all the cliches have it, but on the contrary, by our degree of social dependence, dependence on the social forces that for better or worse are setting the limits and the agendas? If so, we would have to reinterpret the politics of the charge that architects and other professionals have typically wanted, above all, to hold themselves apart from laymen.”

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Rose

40

au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is autonomous in that typifies the city.

Origin:Rose, Gillian. “Archtiecture after Auschwitz.” Assemblage 21 (1993): 62-71.

Exerpt from “Archtiecture after Auschwitz”:“(I)f van Robert Jan van Pelt’s riposte would be that the very unrepresentability of repetition means that it may be harnessed to any evil end, then he has reduced the political meaning of “Auschwitz” to Nazi racist idealism, a represented and realized ideal, by defining the Nazi’s architectural design of Auschwitz as ipso facto proof of the meaning of the city throughout history. This is to repeat, on the scale of a totalizing and abject philosophy of history, the architectural illusion that architecture produces the city, when it is the city that produces architecture.”

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Sherer

41

au•to•no•my n 1 : The autonomy of architecture lies in its aesthetics.

Origin:Sherer, Daniel. “Re: The Politics of Formal Autonomy.” Assemblage 15 (1991): 99-102.

Sherer, Daniel. “Tafuri’s Renaissance: Architecture, Representation, Transgression.” Assemblage 28 (1995): 34-45.

Exerpt from “Re: The Politics of Formal Autonomy” :“Situated on the boundary between form and image, aesthetic autonomy and social determination, contemporary architecture would appear to be in a unique position among cultural practices to articulate ideological critique. Under present cultural conditions, however, architecture has come to serve as an administrative instrument, a vehicle for the reigning ideology of commodification. Nevertheless, architecture can imply social critique by staking a claim to formal autonomy. In theory, this claim arises more or less spontaneously from the aesthetic moment of architecture, its ambiguous relationship to use-value. In practice, however, this architectural aesthetic becomes reified when form is identified with iconography. If one is to take seriously architecture’s claim to possess an aesthetic moment unavailable to commodification, the concept of architectural form must be carefully distinguished from the ideology of the instrumentalized image.”

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Somol

42

au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is an autonomous discipline, but expands beyond Eisenman’s reduction of architecture to points, lines, and columns. Included within architecture is disciplinary discourse, as theory cannot be considered outside of that which is distinctly architectural.

Origin:Somol, R.E. “No Place Like Home: Domesticating Assemblages.” Assemblage 13 (1990): 60-71.

Somol, R.E. “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Assemblage 36 (1998): 84-92.

Exerpt from “No Place Like Home: Domesticating Assemblages” :“Architecture may no longer be able to intervene (if it ever could) in any consistent way with contemporary configurations of the domestic and may primarily be left...to register the power and repressions of the new media only by confessing its own inability to confront them. It is largely as a heterophobic resistance to this that contemporary architectural thought and design turn variously to the arts and crafts, to a disinfected autonomy, to a fifty-year-old public political history, or to a capitalized ‘Assemblage.’”

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Taylor

43

au•to•no•my n 1 : Architectural autonomy cannot be exclusive of architectural writing.

Origin:Taylor, Mark C. “Nuclear Architecture or Rabulous Architecture or Tragic Architecture or Dionysian Architecture.” Assemblage 11 (1990): 6-21.

Exerpt from “Nuclear Architecture or Rabulous Architecture or Tragic Architecture or Dionysian Architecture” :“If architecture is textual and texts are architectural, then the relation between text and building (or construction) is transformed….form itself must be interrogated - as if from within. Text can no more explain architecture than architecture can exemplify text…When text no longer explains and construction no longer exemplifies, architecture becomes archetexture. Writing and construction become the same (without being the identical) textual practice. Text and building intersect in writing, which, though it is never about architecture, might be archetextural.”

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Vidler

44

au•to•no•my n 1 : In the case of museums, architecture must remain autonomous and unaffected by the historical context of the artifacts it is designed to contain.

Origin:Vidler, Anthony. “Losing Face: Notes on the Modern Museum.” Assemblage 9 (1989): 40-57.

Exerpt from “Losing Face: Notes on the Modern Mueum” :“Against such a bleak future of endless repetition, one easily imagined within the premises of ‘collage architecture’ and certainly practiced by exponents of postmodernist allegory, the history of the modern museum offers at least one alternative understanding of architectural representation: the recognition that the construction of a contemporary architecture has to remain entirely distinct from the history that it shelters. Architecture would here be denied a representative and allegorical role in order for it to take on a spatial and structural existence independent of its contents.”

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Whiting

45

au•to•no•my n 1 : Architecture is an autonomous discipline, but expands beyond Eisenman’s reduction of architecture to points, lines, and columns. Included within architecture is disciplinary discourse, as theory cannot be considered outside of that which is distinctly architectural.

Origin:Whiting, Sarah. “Critical Reflections.” Assemblage 41 (2000): 88-89.

Exerpt from “Critical Reflections”:“Recent archtiectural writing is laced with the intricacies of a highly personal excursus...(R)eliance upon the personal narrative signals the ultimate strategy of an ever more thorough diversification of architectural possibilities: every person has a voice.”

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Index ofDictionary Entries

Stanley Allen 20

Stanford Anderson 22

Preston Scott Cohen 23

Alan Colquhoun 24

Peter Eisenman 25Sir Banister Fletcher (see Gulsam Baydar Nalbantoglu)

Mario Gandelsonas 27

Giorgio Grassi (see Alan Colquhoun)

K. Michael Hays 28

Hilde Heynen 29

Jacques Herzog (see Dorothy Huber)

Dorothy Huber 31

Rem Koolhaas 32

Robert Levit (see Preston Scott Cohen)

Adolf Loos (see Stanford Anderson)

Eric Lum 33

Hannes Meyer (see Hilde Heynen)

Mary McLeod 34

Pierre de Meuron (see Dorothy Huber)

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Colin Rowe (see Introduction and Methodology)

Daniel Sherer 41

R.E. Somol 42

Manfredo Tafuri(see Joan Ockman)

Mark Taylor 43

Anthony Vidler 44

Sarah Whiting 45Hans Wittwer (see Hilde Heynen)

Detlef Mertins 35

Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu 36

Joan Ockman 37

Joseph Maria Olbrich(see Stanford Anderson)

Carlo Olmo 38

Jackson Pollack (see Eric Lum)

Bruce Robbins 39

Gillian Rose 40

Aldo Rossi (see Carlo Olmo)

Index