Architecture Thinking across Boundaries

Knowledge transfers since the 1960s

Rajesh Heynickx, Ricardo Costa Agarez, Elke Couchez

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350153196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

While most studies on the history of architectural theory have been concerned with what has been said and written, this book is concerned with how architecture theory has been created and transmitted. Architecture Thinking across Boundaries looks at architectural theory through the lens of intellectual history. Eleven original essays explore a variety of themes and contexts, each examining how architectural knowledge has been transferred across social, spatial and disciplinary boundaries - whether through the international circulation of ideas, transdisciplinary exchanges, or transfers from design practice to theory and back again. Dissecting the frictions, transformations and resistances that mark these journeys, the essays in this book reflect upon the myriad routes that architectural knowledge has taken while developing into architectural theory. They critically enquire the interstices – geographical, temporal and epistemological – that lie beyond fixed narratives. They show how unstable, vital and eminently mobile the processes of thinking about architecture have been.

PART ONE

Translations and
Appropriations

CHAPTER ONE

Deconstruction and Architecture: Translation as a Matter of Speculative Theory

Céline Bodart

In the mid-1980s a French philosopher was thrown into architecture by some American architects. These are the words used by Jacques Derrida to describe his encounter with architecture. He told that he was thrown into it when Bernard Tschumi, who had just won the commission to design the Parc de La Villette in Paris, called and invited him to collaborate with the architect Peter Eisenman on a public gardens project (Michaud, Maso and Popovici-Toma 2015). The prelude to this encounter between Jacques Derrida and architecture is a well-known story, but I would tend to argue that ways of telling and transmitting what has been (for the recent history of architectural theory) one of the most influential cross-disciplinary experiments are quite different from one cultural context to another.

In the Anglo-American sphere, the vast body of literature produced by and on these so-called Derridean years of architecture argues that their encounter played a major role in the implementation of ‘the gilded age of theory’ (Mallgrave and Goodman 2011). With regard to anthologies of architectural theory published in the late 1990s, this particular moment of history appears as a sort of benchmark, from which each of their editors situates his/her version of the history: for example, in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (1996), Kate Nesbitt dedicates an entire chapter to essays written by architects who have worked in close contact with Derridean philosophy, while K. Michael Hays (1998) directly includes Derrida’s texts about architecture among the main theoretical writings dating from the same period. And in a slightly different manner, when the editors of The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (2012) introduce their volume by ‘revisiting Parc de La Villette’, they insist on how this project ‘encapsulated’ and ‘embodied’ the theoretical effervescence of the 1980s – even though they do so only in order to distance their editorial proposal from it.

And yet, in France, that same story still causes a kind of discomfort in the architectural debate, often marked by a strange editorial silence about that specific episode of its own theory’s history. While the influence of Jacques Derrida is largely debated among English language works on the theory of architecture, French architectural literature is much less prolific on that subject. Aside from the three texts about architecture written (originally in French) by the philosopher and published in Psyché in 1987, Derrida’s main public interventions on architecture (lectures, letters, interviews, articles and so on) were not translated into French before 2015 and were still presented as ‘unpublished’ some thirty years after he had been thrown into architecture. Even though his lack of translation could be seen to have scant significance in that English is recognized as architectural theory’s dominant language (Crysler, Cairns and Heynen 2012), this linguistic (and institutional) hegemony affects not only the construction of the history, but also its legacy. What the Derridean deconstruction has left in the Anglo-American architectural debate today has no equivalent in France, forasmuch as its fragmented reception poses the problem of its legacy. On the one hand, the narrative of this cross-disciplinary encounter is told as an active agent of a long and oscillating history; on the other hand, it appears as if immobilized in a silent past, frozen in its own (but limited) archives, preserved as witness of an event that took place but rarely called to account for the effect it has had on actual architectural discourses. In other words: going from one linguistic milieu to another, the same historical episode creates different theoretical narratives and pursuits.

This point needs to be further developed, and this could be done by drawing on specific modes of investigation such as those employed by the sociology of knowledge. Based on the number of publications, references or cultural events (more or less) directly addressed to this specific historical episode, a comparative study could be carried out in order to quantitatively assess its presence in recent architectural discourses through different linguistic contexts (Lamont 1987). Nevertheless, even if such an analysis would certainly provide a valuable contribution to this study of the ongoing effects of the Derridean years of architecture, it is not through these particular modes of analysis that this question will be pursued here. Instead of a sociological approach, the present chapter proposes to approach the question of the effects – both on Anglo-American and French architectural discourses – of this cross-disciplinary encounter by the matter of translation. More precisely, it is the question of accounting for the speculative gap between the overlapped French and Anglo-American narratives of deconstruction in architecture by reflecting on a particular case: the French translation of Mark Wigley’s 1993 essay, titled The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt.

In what follows, I will start by clarifying how the concept of deconstruction produced multiple narratives by travelling from one cultural context to the other; I will then discuss why the act of translation is chosen as a privileged way of (re-)questioning what deconstruction has produced in architectural discourses; and why Wigley’s essay has been chosen as a case suited to this task. Lastly, I will focus on some of the challenges encountered in translating Derrida’s Haunt into French, in order to see how the exercise of translation can be set out as a pretext for rereading convoluted movements of deconstruction in architectural discourses and to explore how appropriation conditions the fortune of theoretical pursuits.

Deconstruction as a concept in motion

The matter of translation underpins the entire debate on deconstruction.¹ Since its invention as a philosophical concept in the 1960s (Derrida 1967; translated into English in 1976), and until the question of its inheritance in current architectural discourses arose, the term of deconstruction went through several successive forms of translation, moving from one language to another, but also and in particular from one intellectual and institutional milieu to many others. To outline that point, I distinguish three sequential movements of translation.²

The first movement is related to the massive and concurrent importation of a large number of French intellectuals’ works into the United States throughout the 1970s; a movement that produced what is today known under the label of ‘French Theory’. Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and others were translated and imported into the Anglo-American intellectual and institutional milieu, ‘presented as a package … despite sometimes weak substantive similarities in their works and, at times, decidedly divergent aspects of their overall positions’ (Lamont 1987: 613). Within this wide and loose movement of importation, Derrida’s trajectory seems to trace a distinctive pattern, fitting particularly well with the ‘climate of the times’ (McLaughlin 1998: 218). In her study about the process of legitimation of interpretative theories in two cultural and institutional contexts as different as France and the United States, Michèle Lamont points out that the American importation of Derrida’s work ‘was made possible by its adaptation to [an] existing intellectual agenda’, especially given its ability to fit with the disciplinary crisis of literary criticism. Literature departments provided an ‘exceptionally strong and concentrated academic support’ to Derrida’s American position, but also reframed his philosophical discourses ‘so that they become understandable and relevant for new audiences’. As Lamont argues to conclude her study, ‘the adaptability of Derrida’s work … is one of the most important conditions of its success’ (Lamont 1987: 612–16; Schrift 2004; Breckman 2010; Currie 2013). From French to English, and (in the same gesture) from philosophy to literary criticism, Derrida’s major concept of deconstruction is both translated and transformed into some theoretical method newly applicable to every kind of text: ‘A study of the reception of deconstruction would trace how the political implications of this keyword of postmodern theory have been continually reinvented – transformed via reception – by the cultural, intellectual and disciplinary contexts in which it has been used’ (Thomas 2006: 3).

The second movement of translation is initiated from this strong anchor point of deconstruction in American Literature departments. But through this specific movement, the translation is no longer seen as a mere passage between languages, but between different disciplinary boundaries traced within the same cultural, institutional and intellectual milieu. Throughout the 1980s, ‘a number of books and articles treating deconstruction in relation to Marxism, Feminism, psychoanalysis and so forth’ concurrently disseminated Derrida’s work across a wide range of fields (Lamont 1987: 610) and, in the United States, the cultural and institutional field of architecture has to be seen as one of those. Infiltrating academic circles through a large number of essays, journals, exhibitions and conferences, the new theoretical apparatus constructed by the literary criticism of Derridean philosophy widely contaminated the architectural debate.³ A new ‘theoretical practice of architecture took shape’ in the wake of French Theory: ‘Theory was more than just a tool – it came to represent a veritable architectural outlook’ (Cusset 2008: 244). Architects – both theoreticians and practitioners – affirmed a new sort of ‘engagement with a particular kind of theory’, deploying and experimenting with various forms of encounters ‘with this extra- and interdisciplinary body of work’ (Crysler, Cairns and Heynen 2012: 8).

My point here is to state that Mark Wigley’s essay, Derrida’s Haunt, has to be considered as one of these products of French Theory in Architecture. It participated and still belongs to the expansion of ‘architectural outlook’ under the influence of the Anglo-American invention of a new sort of ‘theory’. And, reciprocally, it has to be seen as one of these operations that fully participated in the large movement of translation, restructuring and reappropriation of French philosophy by the Anglo-American intellectual milieu. I will develop this point further later on.

The third movement – with which the present reflection attempts to engage – is related to the translation into French of all those discourses produced in different Anglo-American fields of study by French Theory. In an article published...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Mobile Landscape of Post-war Architectural Thought
• PART ONE Translations and Appropriations
• 1 Deconstruction and Architecture: Translation as a Matter of Speculative Theory
• 2 Gehry’s Lou Ruvo Center in Las Vegas as a Housing Critique
• 3 ‘Boomerang Effect’: The Repercussions of Critical Regionalism in 1980s Greece
• 4 The Autonomy of Theory: Tendenzen – Neuere Architektur im Tessin, ETH Zurich, 1975
• PART TWO Imprints and Undercurrents
• 5 Royston Landau and the Research Programmes of Architecture
• 6 Theoretical A/gnosticisms: Paul Tillich, Colin Rowe and the Theology of Architecture
• PART THREE Vehicles
• 7 Cedric Price’s Chats: Orality and the Production of Architectural Theory
• 8 Alternative Facts: Towards a Theorization of Oral History in Architecture
• 9 Abandoning the Plan
• 10 Deltiology as History: Informal Communication as Praxis
• 11 Theorizing from the South: The Seminar of Latin American Architecture
• Index
• Copyright