Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday

353 Pages·2000·11.43 MB·English

by  Alan Read

Architecturally Speaking
Architecturally Speaking is an international collection of essays by leading
architects, artists and theorists of locality and space. New work by celebrated
contributors including Mark Augé, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Anthony Vidler, Lebbeus
Woods and Zaha Hadid is juxtaposed with seminal essays by Bernard Tschumi,
Doreen Massey and Kenneth Frampton. Brand new work on city space and archi-
tecture by radical young companies such as muf and performance artist Graeme
Miller are joined by challenging new visions of orientation in the city by anthropolo-
gist Franco le Cecla and the technologist William J. Mitchell. Together these
essays build to reflect not only what it might mean to “speak architecturally” but
also the innate relations between the artist’s and architect’s work, how they are dis-
tinct and in inspiring ways, how they might relate through questions of built form.
The interdisciplinary is often evoked but in this collection the specificity of prac-
tices and their relation with everyday contexts announces innovative grounds for
collaboration. This book will appeal to urbanists, geographers, artists, architects,
theatre practitioners, cultural historians and theorists.
Alan Read is Professor and Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University
of Surrey Roehampton. Previously he was Director of Talks at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London. A series of talks he arranged there, Spaced Out, was
the genesis of this collection. He is an affiliated professor of Boston University and
founding associate editor of the journal Performance Research.

Architecturally
Speaking
Practices of Art, Architecture
and the Everyday
edited by Alan Read
London and New York
First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Disclaimer: For copyright reasons, some images in the original version of this book are
not available for inclusion in the eBook.
© 2000 selection and editorial matter: Alan Read;
individual chapters: the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Architecturally speaking: practices of art, architecture, and the everyday / edited by
Alan Read.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture–Philosophy. 2. Architecture and society. 3. Artists and architects. 4.
City planning–Philosophy. I. Read, Alan, 1956–
NA2500.A712 2000
720'.1–dc21
00-032186
ISBN 0-415-23543-X (Hbk)
ISBN 0-415-23544-8 (Pbk)
ISBN 0-203-46879-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-77703-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
For my mother
Veronica Mary Read
and in memory of my father
Alan Read (1916–1956)

Contents
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Addressing architecture, art and the everyday 1
Alan Read
Orienting 7
1 Non-places 7
Marc Augé
2 Thirdspace: expanding the scope of the geographical imagination 13
Edward W. Soja
3 Getting lost and the localized mind 31
Franco La Cecla
Locating 49
4 Space–time and the politics of location 49
Doreen Massey
5 Public territory 63
muf with Katherine Shonfield
Moving 87
6 Open transmission 87
Krzysztof Wodiczko
7 Country dance 109
Graeme Miller
Revealing 119
8 Speech sites 119
Alan Read
9 Battle lines: E1027 141
Beatriz Colomina
viii Contents
Conceiving 155
10 Six concepts 155
Bernard Tschumi
11 Rappel a l’ordre: the case for the tectonic 177
Kenneth Frampton
Constructing 199
12 No-man’s land 199
Lebbeus Woods
13 Internal terrains 211
Zaha Hadid
Showing 233
14 Hombroich 233
Oliver Kruse
15 Dear Peter 245
Richard Wentworth
Changing 253
16 Autopoetic architecture: the Open City, Ritoque, Chile 253
Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
17 @morphous mutations 287
François Roche
Prospecting 297
18 Imagining E-Topia 297
William J. Mitchell
19 Planets, comets, and dinosaurs: digital identity in virtual space 305
Anthony Vidler
Responding 321
20 Spaced out 321
Alan Read
Index 331
Contributors
Marc Augé
Marc Augé is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. His books include La traversée du Luxembourg, Un ethnologie
dans le métro and Domaines et Chateaux. His work Non-Places: Introduction to
an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe, is published in the
UK by Verso.
Marc Augé spoke with Alan Read at the Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London as part of Spaced Out IIon 15th November 1995. The text published here
is an edited version of that talk.
Franco La Cecla
Franco La Cecla is currently Senior Research Assistant at the Department of Com-
munication Studies, University of Bologna. His work is concerned with urban
anthropology, indigenous dwelling, resettlements and migrations, multi-ethnic cities
and environmental psychology. His books, published in Italian, include, Mente
Locale: An Anthropology of Dwelling, Misunderstandings: An Anthropology of
Encounters and Getting Lost: Man Without Environment. The text published here
is the first English language translation from this work.
Franco la Cecla spoke at the Royal Society of Arts, London on Monday 16th
November, 1998 on “The Space of Play” with Lucy Bullivant and Alan Read.
Beatriz Colomina
Beatriz Colomina teaches in the School of Architecture at the University of Prince-
ton. She is the author of Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass
Media and editor of Sexuality and Space. Her work considers the developing
systems of communication within which architecture emerges, and architectural
discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation.
Beatriz Colomina spoke with Robert Harbison at the Institute of Contempor-
ary Arts, London, as part of Spaced Out I on 13th March 1995. The following
essay is an edited version of that talk which has subsequently been published
in different form in: Francesca Hughes (ed.) The Architect: Reconstructing Her
Practice(MIT Press 1996).