Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices (Pedagogy and Cultural Practice, V. 5)

338 Pages·2008·22.17 MB·English

by  Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann

RECONSTRUCTING
ARCHITECTURE
ARCHIVE COPY
PEDAGOGY AND CULTURAL. PRACTICE
Edited by Henry Giroux and Roger Simon
Recognizing that pedagogy begins with the affirmation of differences as a
precondition for extending the possibilities of democratic life, the series analyzes
the diverse democratic and ideological struggles of people across a wide range of
economic, social, and political spheres.
5. Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices,
Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, editors
4. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, Linda Brodkey
3. The Crisis of Meaning in Culture and Education, David Trend
2. Margins in the Classroom: Teaching Literature, Kostas Myrsiades and
Linda S. Myrsiades, editors
1. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos
RECONSTRUCTING
ARCHITECTURE
CRITICAL DISCOURSES
AND SOCIAL PRACTICES
THOMAS A. DUTTON AND
LIAN HURST MANN, EDITORS
PEDAGOGY AND CULTURAL PRACTICE
V O L U ME 5
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reconstructing architecture : critical discourses and social practices
/ Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, editors,
p. cm. — (Pedagogy and cultural practice; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2808-4
ISBN 0-8166-2809-2 (pbk.)
1. Architectural practice—Decision making. 2. Architecture and
society—History—20th century. 3. Architecture, Postmodern—Social
aspects. I. Dutton, Thomas A. II. Mann, Lian Hurst. III. Series.
NA1996.R33 1996
720'.1'03—dc20 96-22384
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Modernism, Postmodernism, and Architecture's Social Project
Thomas A. Button and Lian Hurst Mann 1
1 The Suppression of the Social in Design: Architecture as War
Anthony Ward 27
2 The F Word in Architecture: Feminist Analyses in/of/for Architecture
Sherry Ahrentzen 71
3 Second Nature: On the Social Bond of Ecology and Architecture
Richard Ingersoll 119
4 Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy: Cultural Pedagogy and
Architecture
Thomas A. Button 158
s Accommodation and Resistance: The Built Environment and the
African American Experience
Bradford C. Grant 202
6 Deconstruction and Architecture
Margaret Soltan 234
7 Subverting the Avant-Garde: Critical Theory's Real Strategy
Lian Hurst Mann 259
Contributors 319
Index 321
V
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been with us for several years. No project of such duration can come
to fruition without touching many friends and scholars. We are thus indebted to a
wide orbit of folks, who, from conversation to editing drafts, have helped shape the
final outcome.
Having read the manuscript in its proposed form, Jim Mayo and Stephen Haymes
deserve special thanks for their insight and support. The whole project would not
have moved forward without their critique.
People like Tony Schuman, Bill and Sue Stiles, Paul Clarke, and Richard Quantz
have been constant sounding boards, critical and encouraging. We thank their pa-
tience and trust that our exchange has been fruitful for them, as it has been for us.
Many colleagues have read drafts of particular chapters, providing help and
recommendations for making our analyses sharper: Robert Benson, Denise Bratton,
Rita Burgos, Paul Clarke, Sam Hurst, Richard Quantz, Jesse Reichek, Kate Rous-
maniere, Tony Schuman, David Sholle, Leslie Kanes Weisman, and Robert Zwirn.
Special appreciation is due the Department of Architecture at Miami University
and the Labor Community Strategy Center for their extended institutional sup-
port. The project would never have been launched were it not for the time and at-
tention we both were able to devote to conceptualizing the book because of Tom's
sabbatical and Lian's postdoctoral scholar position in the Graduate School of Edu-
cation at UCLA during the year 1992.
To our respective spouses, Janis and Eric, writers and editors both, who were
there at every step, we offer our deepest gratitude for their time and heartfelt apolo-
gies for the disruption this project has caused within their own busy schedules, not
to mention our family lives. This book would not have been possible without their
unending support, intellectual as well as emotional.
Last, we wish to acknowledge the tremendous dedication and vitality of each of
the contributors to Reconstructing Architecture in their commitment to conceive,
write, struggle with, and revise their chapters over a period of three years. We
owe them our deepest gratitude as colleagues and friends.
VII
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Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann INTRODUCTION
MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND
ARCHITECTURE'S SOCIAL. PROJECT
Today, as the world teeters on the edge of a new millennium, saddled with un-
precedented technological capability as well as untold human suffering, archi-
tects concerned with the global transformations of civil society wrestle with the
problems of how to theorize and practice politically progressive architecture. Given
that architecture—practice and discourse—is always social, the central questions
we address in this book are these: What constitutes "the social project" of archi-
tecture in the current historical context? What critical discourses and social prac-
tices advance such a project? Can architecture be reconstituted in terms of a new
social project? Addressing these questions, this book takes the stance that the
dominant understanding of the relationship between architecture and society prop-
agated throughout the institutions of architecture is long overdue for critical re-
assessment. How architects construct an understanding of the social world and
how that construct affects possibilities for practice are pivotal concerns for archi-
tects who seek to challenge the status quo, construct new social formations and
new identities, and help reconstruct a viable democratic public life in the face of
inexorable forces driving economic growth, destroying global ecology, homoge-
nizing culture, and privatizing the public realm. These questions frame our point
of departure for reconstructing architecture in the current period.
The purpose of the book, then, is twofold: (1) to reformulate the role of archi-
tecture in society as well as the specific understanding of architecture's capacity
to further a progressive social transformation and (2) to advance strategies for
practice based on that reformulation. The making of architecture is a social practice;
it is unavoidably an epistemological activity.1 Much of what we know of institutions,
the distribution of power, social relations, cultural values, and everyday life is me-
diated by the built environment. Thus, to make architecture is to construct knowl-
edge, to build vision. To make architecture is to map the world in some way, to inter-
vene, to signify: it is a political ad. Architecture, then, as discourse, discipline, and
form, operates at the intersection of power, relations of production, culture, and rep-
resentation and is instrumental to the construction of our identities and our differ-
ences, to shaping how we know the world. Historically, this practice has constructed
the environments that house the dominant culture and, as such, has acted—de
facto or by intent—to construct consciousness through lived experience.
Critical practices in architecture that recognize their social character, attempt
to alter relations of power, and pursue what we will continue to call "the social
i