Lukasz Stanek, Tahl Kaminer, editors | Trans-disciplinarity: The Singularities and Multiplicities of Architecture
Abstract 
Article [free PDF]
This inaugural issue of Footprint aims at understanding today’s architecture culture as a negotiation between two antithetical definitions of architecture’s identity. The belief in the disciplinary singularity of architectural objects, irreducible to the conditions of their production, is confronted - in discourse and design - with the perception of architecture as an interdisciplinary mediation between multiple political, economic, social, technological and cultural factors. With the concept of trans-disciplinarity, the negotiation between these two positions is investigated here as an engine of the ‘tradition of the present’ of contemporary architecture - the discourses and designs which emerged in the 1960s and defined orientation points for today’s architectural thought and practice.
Jean-Louis Violeau | Why and How 'To Do Science'? On the Often Ambiguous Relationship between Architecture and the Social Sciences in France in the Wake of May '68
Abstract Article [free PDF]
Around the time of the ‘events’ of May ’68, ‘architectural research’ in France posited itself as a direct challenge to the education of the ‘Beaux-Arts’, to the school’s insulation from academic disciplines and to its common lack of a critical dimension required by any ‘scientific’ approach. In this context, the sociologists’ contribution to architecture was long awaited but soon proved to be disappointing, undoubtedly disappointing because the expectations were unreasonably high. In the early 1970s, the contributions of sociologists were perceived as a way to respond to doubts about the professional status of the architect; increasingly, sociologists discerned a desire to escape from the responsibilities and risks of the architectural project, into the sociological discourse. At the same time, following numerous disappointments, even the formerly zealous partisans of the arrival of sociologists finally returned to more sceptical positions towards the role of sociologists in architectural education. This uneasiness is marked by the silence, not to say the omerta, that veils today in France the adhesion of a number of architects of that generation to an ‘architectural postmodernism’ as it was defined during the 1970s, a moment embodied by the contribution of sociologists to the recent history of architecture. Nevertheless, it is the inheritance that makes the heir, as Pierre Bourdieu used to say.
K. Michael Hays | Notes on Narrative Method in Historical Interpretation
Abstract Article [free PDF]
These notes are offered as a sketch of interpretive method. I suggest that the writing of architectural history is, or should be, a deeply theoretical sort of symptomatology — an account of how the very forms and experiences of architecture both construct and repress the absent thing we call the social, and are its most material symbolizations. Such an account benefits from an idea and a practice of narrative. Narrative is an ideological production that avoids any copy theories of representation even as it insists on the real, material forms and events that are its subject matter.
Mark Jarzombek | The Cunning of Architecture’s Reason
Abstract Article [free PDF]
In the past decade, what has been understood by the word 'theory' has been a discourse that has serviced two types of architectural positions. One the one side there is the language of ‘flow’ and its associated liberalist position of open-ended experientialism. On the other side there is ‘techtonics’ and its associations with reactionary imperatives of a phenomenological reclamation of essence. This paper tries to open a third space, one that has received less attention in recent years, but that hones closer to the philosophical problematic of architecture. To that purpose and to resist the tendency to pull philosophy into an operative design position, I will reassess the philosophies of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger to argue that when taken together they constitute a type of closure to the conventions of theory that needs to be addressed before the potential for an exteriority to theory can be formulated. The question of how to locate theory, which is of course an extension of the question of how to locate modernity, is, I shall argue, still tied up in Hegel’s studied – and cunning - ambivalence to architecture as a philosophical project. It is this ambivalence that I attempt to deconstruct in order to make it more operational as a theoretical position.
Ákos Moravánszky | Architectural Theory: A Construction Site
Abstract Article [free PDF]
Around 1968 we saw the birth of a new architectural theory as the conjunction of architectural history and politically engaged architectural criticism. Not the aesthetics of architecture, but architecture itself in its structural relations with social life became the focus of attention. As a result of this development, it is no longer possible to study architectural history without a critical reflection on the method of the study itself and without a grade of interdisciplinarity. Traditional methods of historiography and iconography have been replaced by new approaches configured by psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural studies etc. Appropriation has become the proof of criticality both in architectural theory and in design; however, the understanding of the concepts and methods of other disciplines is basically metaphorical.
The problem for a school of architecture lies not in the ‘criticality’ of the kind of architectural theory we described as emerging from the spirit of 1968, but in its discursive nature. The disciplinary specificity of architecture resists a discursive approach, and architectural students frequently question the usefulness of theory which undermines the notion of the ‘project’, without articulating a constructive proposal. Projectivity does not seem to provide an answer; its claim of performativity lacks the program to regain its organising power over contributions from other specialised disciplines and practices. Theory should focus on the terms of our discipline, which are so close to our ‘core beliefs’ regarding architecture that we usually take their meaning for granted.
It would be wrong to see this focus of theory as a withdrawal into the realm of language. Indeed, after a period of theory alienating architects and the general public, it could now create a rhetoric to influence our understanding of our environment, which is itself organised on the level of language. The requirement that theory should not be directly involved in design practice, but help students to grasp the underlying problems and their historic roots, will allow theory to exert its influence on design development.
Patrick Healy | Max Raphael, Dialectics and Greek Art
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The article outlines what is required for a theory of art in the late work of Max Raphael, by showing that it is a response to a problematic first formulated, but left unanswered, by Marx, and which can be seen as developed by Raphael in his writing, especially the text he devoted to a dialectic interpretation of Greek art, with special reference to temple architecture. In detailing this latter study it is possible to see how Raphael’s understanding and analysis is guided by his account of an empirical theory of art, and contributes to its further elaboration.
Wouter Davidts | The Vast and the Void. On Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and 'The Unilever Series'
Abstract Article [free PDF]
Since the opening Tate Modern in 2000, the vast space of the Turbine Hall has hosted The Unilever Series. Widely acclaimed artists Louise Bourgeois, Juan Munõz, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Whiteread, Carsten Höller and most lately Doris Salcedo accepted the invitation to ‘tackle’ what is arguably the biggest museum space in the world and realized what is invariably held to be their ‘biggest work ever.’
The Unilever Series is not the only large-scale installation series. In recent years, we witnessed the worldwide launch of ever larger art commissions for increasingly vaster spaces, resulting in all the more colossal artworks. Only recently, Paris announced its own yearly art commission for the central nave of the Grand Palais, suitably entitled Monumenta.
The essay examines The Unilever Series in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and discuss it within the global leap in scale and massive expansion of the art and museum world, of which the London institution and its vestibule in particular are the most blatant exponents. While it is certainly true that the spectacular expansion of art installations has occurred in tandem with a profusion of large international exhibitions and ‘destination’ museum of inordinately vast proportions, the assumption that large exhibition spaces demand an art of size is too simplistic. By examining the institutional, spatial and material disposition of the Turbine Hall, I will demonstrate that it is far more than a plain and abstract emblem of the global inflation and growth of museum and exhibition spaces. It’s a distinct architectural exponent of this tendency that essentially in and of itself has informed the inflation of the artworks that have been commissioned for it.
Arie Graafland | Peter Eisenman: The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture
Abstract Article [free PDF]
For quite a while, Peter Eisenman’s dissertation lived the life of a mystery text. Many architectural theorists knew about it, but it was not published until 2006. The facsimile reprint by Lars Müller finally makes available the complete typographic script that Eisenman defended in August 1963 at the University of Cambridge.
Isabelle Doucet | A Vision for Brussels: Fuel to the Urban Debate or, at Last, an End to the Brussels Trauma?
Abstract Article [free PDF]
In her article Isabelle Doucet discusses the recent exhibition ‘A Vision for Brussels: Imagining the Capital of Europe’, curated by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Joachim Declerck from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, at the BOZAR Centre of Fine Arts in Brussels. Rather than discussing the exhibition as such, she re-positions it within the broader context of recent as well as concurrent contributions to the Brussels debate. By doing so, she treats the exhibition and its accompanying publication as the departure point for a reflection on how Brussels reflects on Brussels. She relates the exhibition to some ‘brand new’ attempts to provide a strong vision for this European Capital: two new journals about ‘planning the capital’ and another Europe-in-Brussels exhibition. However, while she argues that ‘A Vision for Brussels’ aims to formulate a vision for the architectural discipline too, she questions whether ‘A Vision for Brussels’ produces a ‘vision’ for the city, a full-blown ‘project’ for Brussels and/or a ‘solution’ to the crisis of architecture and the city as well. In other words, who is leading the show in the exhibition: Brussels, Europe or the architecture and urban design disciplines?
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