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Article Excerpt
Stanley Mathews. From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price.
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. 284 pp., 39 color ills., 181 b/w. $45 paper
Felicity D. Scott. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 304 pp., 77 b/w ills. $29.95
Architecture might be considered the only truly abstract aesthetic discipline. Architecture is by and large nonreferential. In fact, it is a self-referential medium: a building looks like nothing so much as a building. Yet in contrast to the relative autonomy of music, painting, and sculpture-, architecture must also endure a special kind of violence, one that reduces it from a careful assembly of masonry, concrete, steel, and glass into a mere node at the meeting point of a series of vectors, representing the competing interests of different constituencies: developers, governmental officials, community boards, contractors, neighbors, realtors, and buyers.
Given the intensely political maneuvers necessary to bring a building into being, it is not surprising that the majority of architects, both now and historically, have considered political engagement to be something with which they have grappled only under duress, in the line of duty, or as a last resort. Politics are too real; they impede the only remnants of the creative impulse and often compromise the purity of vision that "autonomous" creators enjoy.
The two books here under review--Stanley Mathews's volume on the visionary British architect Cedric Price and Felicity Scott's on conceptual architectural practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s--bracket the discussion of the place of politics in architectural production. Each deals largely with so-called paper architecture: projects that never aid (and probably never will) see the light of day. Such projects play a significant role within architectural praxis: given the difficulty of bringing buildings to fruition, experimental and fantastic designs provide laboratories for working out complex ideas about space, program, and context--creating virtual manifestos of possible future architectures. Hence, despite, their avowed impracticality, such schemes and drawings often achieve iconic status equal to (or even surpassing) that of built structures. Two factors are at play in the background of the books under consideration here: in Britain, the perceived failure of postwar reconstruction efforts to follow through effectively on the promise of visionary practitioners, and in the United States, the emergence of an oft-marginalized avant-garde desiring to assess architecture's role.
The "spacelessness" of these works, however, raises a crucial problem, namely the difficulty of imagining them inserted into the spaces of everyday life (not to mention the utility of lingering amid experimental frameworks in the first place).To talk of politics within (his imaginary realm is a somewhat fraught proposal; cither the works become mere corollaries to larger discussions within the territory of local and international governmental policies, or the political content diminishes in the (wrongly) accepted aestheticization of these imaginary lands canes. Both authors should be commended tor daring to deal with this topic often ignored in architectural history, Especially taken together, their hooks train a focused lens on the imbricated themes of architecture and politics.
Mathews's book, on Price comes out of his 2003 dissertation on the late British architect and dandy. The dissertation's title,...
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