7/21/2019 Speaks, M.- Which Way Avant Garde (Article-2001)

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Which Way Avant-Garde?Author(s): Michael SpeaksSource: Assemblage, No. 41 (Apr., 2000), p. 78Published by: The MIT Press 

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7/21/2019 Speaks, M.- Which Way Avant Garde (Article-2001)

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Which Way Avant garde?

I have always found charmi ng Colin Rowe's story about modern architecture's

trip across the Atlantic Ocean; how

its

physique flesh and

its

morale word, or

its

form and ideology, became separated; how ideology either remained in Europe

or dropped off somewhere in the cold waters

of

the Atlantic; how form arrived on

American shores to become the style of corporate America; and how,

as

a result

of

American postwar military and cultural supremacy, this formalist architecture

became the international style sold to the rest of the world

as

truly modern.

Rowe's little story is equally applicable to theory, that set of mostly French, Ger

man, and Italian philosophical tracts that arrived in the United States in the late

1970s through departments

of

comparative literature and were disseminated to the

rest of American academe

as

a wonderful new mode of contemporary thought.

Theory, like modern architecture, was detached from

its

Continental origins and

replanted in the States, where it took on a lighter, more occasional existence.

Theory carried all the punch of philosophy without the windy German preambles

and recondite French qualifications, without, that

is,

years of study, political

affiliation, or deep knowledge. Theory was a weapon of the young, the post-'68

generation wearied

by

the morality and slowness of their elders who seemed

so

untheoretical, whether they embraced or rejected theory. Theory was fast philoso

phy and it made

its way

through various sectors of the American academy in the

1970s and I 980s, arriving to architecture late,

as

Mark Wigley has so famously and

so

frequently pointed out. And when it did, it

was

inevitable that theory and the

formalist modern architecture described

by

Rowe would cross paths.

Driven

by

an attempt to reconnect form and ideology, Rowe 's story gives

us

a

way to understand more clearly the contemporary avant-garde's ambitions to re-

establish the social mission

of

modern architecture, and to do

so

in a formal

vo-

cabulary that is recognizably modern. Nowhere has this been more evident than

in journals such

as Assemblage

and

ANY,

both of which are drawing their last

breath this year. In these magazines , theory

was

attached to experimental form in

an attempt

to

create a critical, resistant, avant-garde architecture with Left-lean

ing sympathies. But sometime in the mid- to late 1990s the avant-garde desire to

reconnect form and ideology diminished

as

form began to melt into blobs and

fields

of

data while ideology loosened up and became reconfigured

as

identity

branding and lifestyle.

As

pop science, new computer technologies, and cluster

ing became more pressing issues in architecture, the critical position ostensibly

enabled by theory began to loose its hold on the avant-garde. Resolutely critical

and resistant to an emergent commercial reality driven

by

the forces

of

globaliza

tion, weighed down

by its

historical attachment to philosophy , and unable to rec-

. ognize itself

as

a new mode

of

commodified thought, theory has not been free or

quick enough to deal with the blur of e-commerce and open systems. Ultimately,

theory, and the avant-garde project it enabled, has proven inadequate to the

vi-

cissitudes of the contemporary world. And so today we stand at the end of a his

torical period of experimentation dominated

by

Rowe's little story.

What is next? It is not clear, bu t if reports from the frontier of the new economy

offer any indication, there is emerging an experimental disposition evidenced

by

a new generation

of

thinkers who are more favorable to Peter Drucker and Kevin

Kelly than to Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, or Gilles Deleuze. Indeed,

around the world today, and especially in North America and Europe, there

is

a

fascination with business culture that has altogether superseded the old distinc

tions between avant-garde and corporate practices so impor tant to Rowe's story.

What has emerged in

its

place is a distinction between innovative and corporate

practices, between, for example, OMA and SOM. In the United States, much of

this attention has been focused on a new breed

of

managers and entrepreneurs

who are now showcased in business lifestyle magazines such

as

Fast Company

Red Herring  

and

Business

2.0. Elsewhere, in the United Kingdom and on the

Continent the focus has been on a fresh generation of researchers working out

8 Michael Speaks

of

think tanks such

as

Demos in London or the Advanced Management Program

in Stockholm. Charles Leadbeater, an associate of the former and author of Liv-

ing

on

Thin Air

(Viking, 1999), and Jonas Ridderstr:ile and Kjelle Nordstrom,

professors at the latter and authors of Funky Business (Pearson, 2000), have be

come major intellectual forces in this movement. Whether in the U.S., the U.K.,

or on the Con tinent , these new managers and consultants have emerged

as

he

roes in the struggle to tame and make sense of the complex world that has been

thrown up

by

the forces of globalization.

Though witnessed primarily in the fast-paced world of global business

consultancies, these managerial avant-gardists (and surely this

is

not the proper

name

for

a class of doers who have altogether outstr ipped the ambit ions of any his

torical avant-garde) are showing up with greater frequency in the world of high de

sign, architecture, and urban planning, especially in schools of architecture. One

of the most aggressive is the

AA

 s new Design Research Laboratory, whose mission

can be gleaned from this statement

by

DRL co-head Patrick Schumacher: The

business of architecture is not excepted from the challenge of competitive innova

tion.

The

accelerating economic restructuring is affecting the organization of ar

chitectural production as much

as

every other sphere

of

production In a time

of momentous restructuring, questions concerning design product and process

can only be addressed within an academic framework that understands architec

ture as a research based business rather than a medium of artistic expression

Daidalos 69-70 [1998-99]). The assertion is very bald,

very

clear. Architecture

should no longer recoil from the degraded world of business and managerial

thinking. On the contrary, it should aggressively seek to transform itself into a re-

search-based business. This sober assessment of the relationship between research

and design is now an important feature of the current work being done at the

Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and has also become one of the organizing features

of Metropolitan Research and Design, a new postgraduate program started this

past year at SCI-Arc. It is my contention that this managerial approach provides

the intellectual infrastructure necessary for the development of a fleet-footed gen

eration of architects and urbanists ready to meet globalization's challenge:

namely, the challenge presented by quantity and commercialization to develop

softer design strategies flexible enough to deal with the demands o f the market.

Though the managerial disposition described above has made a strong break with

the avant-garde practices enabled in Rowe's little story,

it

has returned

us

all to the

problematic relationship between thinking and doing raised

by

American pragma

tism, an issue that strongly influenced the last of the great theory figures, philoso

pher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze wanted to shift our attention

away

from thought

that tethered

us

to fundamental truths and toward thought that enabled us to act.

But Deleuze was perhaps still too much a philosopher to acknowledge the inepti

tude of fast philosophy, or theory, when compared to the concept production of

the young executives and consultants whom he scorns

in

the introduction to the

brilliant book What Is Philosophy? (Columbia University Press, 1994). Just

as

theory confronts philosophy with

its

with slowness and morality,

so

does manage

rial pragmatist thought confront theory with

its

complicated relationship to the

dreams and utopian aspirations of philosophy. Despite the best efforts

of

his

French theory adherents, and indeed despite his own prejudices against man

agement thinking, the most important form

of

American pragmatism, the work of

Deleuze will be brought to fruition not

by

communists like us,

as

Antonio Negri

and Felix Guattari dreamed

in

their pamphlet of the same name, but

by

intellec

tual entrepreneurs and managers of change in the fierce world o f globalization.

There is indeed important work to be done in the realm

of

architectural thinking

after the end of theory, ANY , Assemblage, and the like. But if it is to survive and

flourish, this work must focus on time , interactivity, and innovation, and

give

up

its

obsession with space, originality, and the utopian search for the new.

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