Colomina - Media As Modern Architecture - 2008

 

Media as Modern Architecture

Media as Modern rchitecture Co/amino

59

The process is so laborious and time consuming that Demand

can make only a few photographs a year. T he photographer is working at the speed of an architect, and yet Thomas Demand sees media as architecture, in his words, as a vast landscape, a

little by little he is building a city

virtual domain with its cities of scandals, its towers of superstars, and its marsh

made of diverse crime scenes (past

of murders. l

and present) and other media

This may explain why he builds it, why he takes images from the world

charged

sites, which

now

by

of m e di a - phot ogr aphs aphs of crime sites, most n o tab ly - an d builds them as

association look

crime scenes.

scale constructions in paper and cardboard, strong enough to hold only until the

These sites are almost always interi

photograph is taken, after which he destroys the original modeL T he new pho

ors ors:: bathro oms, corridors, kitchens,

tographs join the media world that originated them. A forensic image of the

staircases, dining tables, offices,

German politician Uwe Barschel, found dead, fully dressed, in the bathtub of a

TV studios, sinks. Even a forest

hotel in Geneva and published on the cover of Der Stern in 1987 (fig. I), becomes

Bathroom of 1997 (fig. 2);

Clearing, 2003), a

hedge

Hedge,

the hallway leading to serial killer

1996), grass Lawn, 1998) and the

Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment in Milwaukee becomes Corridor (1995); the tunnel in

night sky ( Constellation, 2000) be

Paris where Princess Diana and Dodi AI-Fayed were killed in 1997, which was

come in his photographs interiors,

repeatedly photographed and televised world

enveloping spaces. A city of interi

Demand's photograph

wide, becomes the site for

Tunnel (1999), a

two-mi nute 35-millimeter film film loop; a security camera image of an escalator in London that

63 x 48 in. (160 x 122 em)

as if one massive crime had taken place, with Demand as our tour

was passed by muggers before they murdered

guide through the ruins. In fact, he

Escalator (2000); a press

has said at one point, I like to imagine the sum of all media representation of the

someone becomes

photograph of the presidential election re

event as a kind of landscape, and the media industry as the tour-bus company that

count in Palm Beach County, Florida, on

takes us through this colourful surrounds. 2 To walk through a Demand

16 November 2000, becomes the photograph

tion is to walk through such a city.

Poll (2001);

the kitchen in Saddam Hussein's

Why will a historian of modern architecture be interested in such art prac

hideaway house in Tikrit, Iraq, becomes

tices? At an obvious level, all the spaces Demand reconstructs are modern. He is making

Kitchen (2004); and so

on. A steady succes

sion of supercharged and super-exposed images

Fig. I. Cover of Der Stern, Stern, October 1987

ors, then. A city devoid of people, Fig. 2. Thomas Demand (Gennan. born 1964), Bathroom 1997. C.print.

models of modern architecture and photographing them. More significantly, I find myself in a symmetrical position to that of Demand, since I have been arguing

are reconstructed. t s interesting to note that

some time now that modern architecture is a form of media, that it is not just a

if Demand takes images from mass-media

set of buildings in the streets but is built as image in the pages of magazines and

spectacle, he returns them in unspectacular

newspapers. This is not just because architects are trying to sell a product, making

mode. The architecture he finds within

advertising images of their spaces-although that is also dearly the cas e- b u t before

spectacle is completely unspectacul unspectacular. ar.

that, the image is itself a space carefully constructed by the architect.

 

 

60

Media as Modern Architecture

Beatriz Colomina

Modern architecture is all about the mass-media

The architects of the Renaissance established ways

of

going about

which perhaps we unconsciously follow: for example, between the idea

image. That's what makes it

sketchily stated and the commission commission

f or t he

modern, rather than the usual

the

masque; the architectural setting settings s

story about functionalism,

and decorations for the birthday

new

61

of

he

court

materials, and new

ducal daughter; for the entry

of for

technologies. In fact, mod

were used as opportunities

ern architecture, as Reyner

new

Banham pointed out, is not

for

a single day

very functional at all. And

for

the permanent. permanent.3

sort of

of

the prince, for the wedding

a Pope into a the nealisation

space; the new weight ... he

permanent building came

of

of

a

state; these events of

the

new

style; the

decoration; made real perhaps

transient enjoyably consumed, creating the taste

new technologies? W ho can forget the images of Le

As in the Renaissance, the Smith sons' sons' Hou se of the Futur e was staged architec architecture, ture,

Corbusier s houses under

a shimmeri ng masque, which doesn't make the proposal le less ss provocat provocative ive but per

construction exposing the

haps more: Like al alll exhibitions, the y live live a life of say a week or four weeks in

bricks before they were care

reality, then they go on and on forever. Like the Barcelona Pavilion before it was

fully covered over with plaster

reconstructed.

of

he Futul'C, 1956. Daily l"'lail

temporary turns out to be permanent.

The most extreme and influential proposals in the history of modern

pression that the houses were

architecture were made in the context of temporary exhibitions. The Smithsons

actually made of concrete? Or

saw their House of the Future following this tradition: Le Corbusier and Pierre

the walls of the Barcelona

Jeanneret's Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau in Paris 1925), Konstantin Melnikov's

Pavilion, which were in the

Market in Moscow 1924) and USSR Pavilion in Paris 1925), Mies and Lily Reich's

end load-bearing, even if

Fig, 3. Alison and Peter Smithson, Bathtub, House Ideal Home Show, London

4 The

and paint to give the im

Velvet and Silk Cafe for the Women's Women's Fashion Exhibition in Berlin (1927),

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's Nestle Pavilion in Paris 1928), Walter Gropius's

claimed that it was there, in

Werkbund Exhibition in Paris 1930) and so on.

the pavilion, that he first re

From Charles and Ray Eames, the Smithsons had learned how to transform

alized the independence of

images on display into architecture. This was already already evident in the ir 1953 exhibi

ife andArt in which

wall from supporting structure (let alone the fact that the principle had been an

tion with Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, Parallel

nounced five years earlier by Le Corbusier and that the practice was long in place

an architecture of images was was inserted into a traditional room, creating a room in

in American steel-frame steel-frame structures). Or Alison and Peter Smithson's Smithson's curving Ho use

side a room (fig. 4). And it would continue when the same team assembled Patio

(fig.. 3), whi ch was not made of plastic at all but was a simu of the Future of 1956 (fig

and Pavilion in 1956, essent essentially ially anothe r room with in a room, except that now the

lation, a full-scale mock-up in plywood, plaster, and emulsion paint, traditional

inside walls of the outer room (the patio) were lined in aluminium, making the

materials collaborating to produce the effect of a continuous moulded plastic

visitor, endlessly reflected on the walls, part of the exhibit. The space was filled with found archaic objects treated as images, laid out like a large painting to be

surface. Modern architecture was was staged architecture, a masque, as Alison and Peter

walked through in the patio, with the visitors visitors incorporated into the image, or look

Smithson put it. The Smithsons saw the tradition of such temporary theatrical

ing from behind the wires that replaced the missing wall of the pavilion to keep visitors out, or looking through the translucent corrugated plast plastic ic roof of the pavil-

structures as a centuries-old tradition in architecrure:

1

 

62

Media as Modern Architecture

Beatriz Colomina

63

Fig,S. Ludwig M,es van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion, 1929. The Museum of Modern Art New York. The Mles van der Rohe Archive

Fig. 4. Alison and Peter Smithson. Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi.

arallel

of   ife ondArt

19511nstrtute of Contemporary

Arts, London

International Exhibition in Barcelona, even journalists sent by professional architectural magazines passed it over entirely, unable

ion, which had the effect of an almost photographic vision. The House of the

to

detect its significance. Naive

visitors and local journalists provided t he only testimony to its existence. existence. They

Future, on the other hand, was a display case that, like the objects i t displayed, was

commented on the mysterious effect, effect, because a person standing in fron t of one

pure image. Both the house and the objects inside were treated as images, and they

of these glass walls sees himself reflected as if by a mirror, but if he moves behind

combined to produce one single smooth image, a glossy ad that could be placed

them, he then sees the exter ior perfectly. Not all the visitors notice this curious par5 It

alongside any other ad, participating in the flow of popul ar imagery, intense images images

ticularity whose cause remains ignored.

that dom inated for a moment only to be quickly replac replaced. ed.

of statements to understand the surprise that a glass building produced in I929,

Exhibitions in the twentieth century acted as sites for the incubation of new forms of architecture that were sometimes so shockingly original, so new, that

is necessary to go back to these kinds

something that the generation that has grown grown up arou nd Hilt on International hotels may have difficulty imagining.

they were not even recognized as architecture at alL Think for example, of Mies

It was was only in the 1950S, in the aftermath of the 1947 Mies exhibition at

van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion fig. 5), widely understood in the architectural

the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated by Philip Johnson, that the

world today as the most influential building of the twentieth century. century. It was in fact

Barcelona Pavilion burst into every architectural publication. 6

seen by nobody.

became dominant, the pavilion was hailed as the most beautiful building of the

Despi te its prominent location in the layout of the 19 2 9

glass architecture

 

I

64

I

Beatriz Colomina

 

.

Media as Modern Architecture

yourself in the street when

century, exemplifying exemplifying the cult of transp transparency. arency. A building th at was known only exhibition in

ing at them, drawn into the image.

Barcelona and its fragments misplaced during its return trip to Germany) became

The viewer of the photomontage

the most significant monument of modern architec architecture. ture.

experiences the space of the street, then arrives at the new building

through magazine images (it was dismantled at the closing of

What is crucial about the Barcelona Pavilion is that it was both real, a

at the end.

one-to-one construction t hat existed for for a time, and an image, image, a media construc tion. All we knew about it, before its reconstruction in 1 9 8 6 were the photographs.

These drawings

and

It lived lived in the photographs. If temporary buildings like the Barcelona Pavilion had their full force as

models were not simply docu

images, some images have the full force of buildings. Think of Mies's famous proj

fact, Mies could not have built

ments of projects to be built. In

ect of he Glass Skyscraper of 1922 where the model is made to look like a building

any of them at the time, even if

that has already been constructed, with light, reflections, greenery, and adjacent existing buildings (fig. 6). He

give given n the opportunity. He didn't:

photographed it so as to give the impression that the

cal expertise yet. In fact, Mies's place in architectural history, his

have the knowledge, the techni

ing is living, removing all traces

role as one of the so-called fathers

of it being a model and care

of he modern movement, was es-

fully fully blurring the line between

tablished through a series of five

the object and its background.

projects, none of them acrually

He had done the same

built (or even buildable-they

thing with drawing in the ear

were not developed at th at level),

lier version of the project, his

he made public through ex-

entry into the Friedrichs Friedrichstrass trassee

hibitions and publications publications during

skyscraper competition of 1921 skyscraper in which he tried to produce

Fig, 7. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Glass Skyscraper, Berlin, 1921. Photomontage with pencil and charcoal drawings. Fonds Peter Carter Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal

effect effect that th e building al

1922

the Reinforced Concrete

Office Building of 1923 and the Concrete and Brick Country Houses of 1923

a rendering of the building

1924.

onto a photograph of the street

garde and professional, such as Fruhlicht, G the Journal

and refining the design in a series of photomontages that

Fig. 6. ludwig Mles van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper, Berlin, 1922. Model (no longer rhe Museum of Modem Art New York. I Mres van der Rohe

the first half of the 1920S: the two Glass Skyscrapers of 1921 and

ready existed, photomontaging

cars and electrical cables, cables,

Archive

65

The projects were exhibited and published in a long list of journals, avant

the American Institute

Architects, Merz Wasmuths Monatshefte for Baukunst L Architecture Vivante, as well as in many books on modern architecture written during It was

19 2 05.

architectures, together with five projects, these five paper architectures,

culmi nated in a canonical ren

the publicity apparatus enveloping them, that first made Mies into a historical

dering (fig. 7). It is important to note that these images are

figure. The proje projects cts that he had built so far and that he would con tinue to develop during the same yea.:s would have taken him nowhere.

so large that you find

In that sense, Mies is a good illustration of the point that modern archi-

I,

 

66

Media as Modern Architect ure

Beatriz Colomina

67

tecture is a form of media. Modem architecture becomes m odem not simply by

a model. s Even the drawings look like a model. The atectonic quality of the work

using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, as it is usuall usually y understood, but byengag

made it appear as if it were made of cardboard. We know it is a building, but

ing with th e media: with publications, competitions, exhibitions. With Mies, this

looks like a paper model. With Demand's work, the opposite is true: We think it

is literally the case. What had been a series of rather conservative projects realized for real clients (the Riehl House, the Pe Perls rls House, the Kroller-Miiller House, the

is real until we l ook closely and realize realize that it is a photograph of a modeL Loos himself built half-finished models to understand the complexities of

Urbig House) gave way in the context of the Friedrichstrasse competition, of G,

his own Raumplan Drawings were not adequate representations of his three

of Friihlicht and so on, to a series of manifestos of modem architecture.

dimensional volumes. When actually building a space, Loos refused to complete

Further, in Mies one can see, perhaps as in no other architect of the modern

it

drawings drawin gs unti l the building was finished, and he continued to make changes changes dur

movement, a true case of schiw phren ia between his paper pro jects and those de

ing construction. According to Heinrich Kulka, one of his collaborators, Loos

veloped for his clients. In the 19205, at the same time that he was developing developing his

would walk through the space and say, I do not like the height of this ceiling,

most radical projects, Mies could build such conservative houses as the Villa

change it " 9- in a way, treating the actual building as a model.

Eichstaedt in a suburb of Berlin (1922) and the Villa Mosler in Potsdam (1924).

Loos criticized the way architects of his time had started to design so that

Can we blame these projects on the conservative taste of Mies s clients? Not so easily.

their buildings would look good in photographs. The building eventually came to

Mosler was a banker, and his house is said to have reflected his taste. But when i n 1924 the art historian and constructivist artist Walter Dexel, who was very much inter

resemble the model in the photograph. Media wa wass transforming architecture into an image to be circulated around the world. Until the advent of photograph photography y and

ested in and supportive of modern architecture, architecture, commissioned Mies to design a

the illustrated magazine, never had so many people become intimately familiar

house for him, Mies blew it. Unable to come up with the mo dern house his client

with so many buildings they would never see. Architect Architecture ure circulated througho ut

desired, he gave one excuse after another. The deadline was repeatedly postponed.

the world in the pages of these journals. The impact of the images has been so

And in the end, Dexel gave the project to another architect'? For many years, Mies

transformative that even when in the presence of an actual building, visitors in

was literally trying to catch up with his publications. Perhaps that is why he worked

evitably see it through the lens of the images they

so hard to produce a sense of realism in the representation of his projects, as in the

to the images, images, attempting to reproduce canonical canonical photographs in their snapshots. snapshots.

photomontage of the Glass Skyscraper with cars flyin flying g by on the Friedrichstrasse. Mies photographed the model to give the illusion illusion that it could be

u lt-

~ r e

d y

know, trying to match it

If modern architecture architecture is produced within the space of photographs and

publications, this space is for the most pa rt two-dimens two-dimensional, ional, and at a certain point

perhaps even to convince himself that he could b uild it. In fact, one could argue that

architecture some how internalizes that space, that flatness. The three-dimensional

he did build it. The image is the project. In the imagination of architects the world

world becomes a photographic surface.

over, the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper was built and was responded to by countless other projects. projects. How is that possible? possible? The model, the photomont age, the drawing has to have enough detail detail to

sustain the illusion that it is real. This illusion is facili facilitated tated by the fact that mod

Thomas Demand takes us the other way around. He takes images fumiliar to us through the media and turns them into three-dimensional paper-and cardboard constructions, ephemeral materials like those of the media, and photographs them only to destroy the model. He builds the architecture of the image. image. In t hat sense, it can be argued that he is a modern architect.

em architecture polemically removed most of the detail. In fact, it was criticized

Architects act as if their buildings were mainly images; they design the

at the beginning of the twentieth century for appearing like a model in photo

image. Even if their designs are built, they are handed down, as it were, to the oc

graphs, a critique articulated not simply by unsympathetic journalists and critics

cupants as a kind of used prop to inhabit. No architect has any deep interest in

but also also by oth er modem architects. Adolf Loos, for example, criticized Joseph

how his or her buildings are occupied. Demand takes the opposite approach. He

Hoffmann's architecture in precisely those terms. t was hard to determine whether

takes the image, builds the model of that space in full scale, and destroys it after

the photographs of his work in architectural magazines depicted the real thing or

producing anot her image.

 

68

Beatriz Colomina

Media as Modern Architecture

69

tographed; it is an extension of the lens that is then replaced with another exten sion. In other words, it is not that he moves the camera into the model to photograph it. The model only exists for the camera in one position. Demand explains that at first he created these paper spaces as sculpture and that he took photographs only to keep a record of them, since it was impos

sible to keep them physically as sculptures. But he didn t like what he saw He tried to learn photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, who told him he would have

to attend photography school for three years befor beforee they could teach him anything.

It didn t seem very practical, practical, so he started building a second sculpture t hat, when photographed, would look like the first one. For a while he was building two ob jects: one sculpture based on the media photograph and another that would communicate better in a photograph the idea of the first. Note again the symme

try with modern architecture, which was built so that it would look good in

photographs, so as to better communicate the idea of modern architecture, which meant looking like a cardboard modeL Photography in modern architecture re produced the feeling of paper. Demand s photographs try to reproduce the feeling

of space created by the paper model, whi ch reconstructs a space that existed as an

image at one particular point in time. der Rohe at the Museum of Modern Art New yo -k photogrdphed by William Leftwich in 1947. Edward Fig. 8. ludwig Mies Duckett Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives. The Ar t Institute of Chicago

Most of these spaces have have specific dates attached: the day the j ournal was

published; the day Diana died; the days of the vote recount in Florida; even dates in the future, as in Constellation which represents

Perhaps the word model is misleading here. Demand is not simply

2300.

sky over Paris on

23

November

Temporality is important in this work. It is not that the models are used and

modelling something that is then transformed into an image; he is building the

then destroyed. They are already falling falling apart the moment they are finish finished. ed. This

image itself The procedure is different from that of the typical modern architect.

falling apart is already beginning in the photograph. We see a world not so much

Mies, Le Corbusier, and the Eameses built models and photographed them from

freshly built as in the threshold of undoing its elf - ju s t like a newspaper, which

many angles, day and night, then chose an image. In fact, architects never seem to

starts to disintegrate the moment we start reading it, or like modern architecture,

tire oflooking at their models. They even photograph themselves doing so. A pho

which starts to fall apart the moment it is built. The immaculate empty surfaces

tograph of Mies at the Museum of Modern Art during the exhibition of his work

of modern architecture immediately started t o deca decay, y, revealing their own imper

in 1947 shows the architect bent over, looking through the model of his Farnsworth

fections all too clearly. Yet immaculate surfaces survive forever in photographs,

House as ifhe had never seen it before, his large head acting like a camera (fig. 8).

showing endless optimism, the utopian dream of the architect. Demand s vision

A photograph of the Eameses from around the same time shows the couple look

of the threshold of decay is more of a dystopia and therefore fundamentally different

ing adoringly at the model of the first version of the Eames House as if t were a

from that of the architect.

newborn baby they are about to kiss.

Modern architects see everything through the camera. They make decisions

An exception is a project by the architect Bernard Tschumi, who in 1976 produced

dvertisements for Architecture a series of postcards juxtaposing words

on the basis of what they see through the lens. With Demand, the position of the

and images, each a kind of manifesto of modern architecture. In one of them, un

camera is already determined. The camera is alread already y par t of the interior being pho-

der an image of Le Corbusier s Villa Savoye in a state of disrepair, the text reads:

 

70

Media

Beatriz Colomina

The most architectural architectural thing about this build ing is the state of decay decay in which it

as

Modern Architecture

7

Images are are the new architecture, the unclass unclassified ified background material

is (fig. 9). Paradoxically Paradoxically,, altho ugh th e building has now been fully restored, the

1950s.10   against which we pass our lives, as Alison and Peter Smithson stated in the  the  1950s.10

decay survives survives in Tschumi's advertis ements, as well as in Rene Burri's photographs

This repre represents sents a fundamental transformation of the urban condition of even

for Magnum. Like Demand, Tschumi appropriates media images and treats them as

the previous fifi:yyears. If Walter Benjamin described architecture as that art form that is perceived only unconsciously, in a state of distraction, that role is now being

architecture. And, as with Demand, it is not the building i n the images images that makes

taken over by images. An endless flow of image imagess now constitutes the environment.

them architecture bu t the event: in Tschumi's advertisements, somebody thrown out

Buildingi> become images, and images become a kind of building, occupied like any

of a window or a body tied up with rope ropes; s; in Demand's photographs, a dead body

other architectural space space.. The significance of architects like Mies, Le Corbusier, and

in a bathtub or the hallway hallway leading to Jeffre Jeffrey y Dahmer's Milwaukee apartment.

Eameses lies in their particular sensitivity sensitivity ro this transformation. The y understood

of Villa Savoye is the decay of

that what it meant to be an architect in the twentieth century was completely different

modern architecture, even the decay of the very image of modern architecture, architecture, of

from what it had meant for the previous century. Images had become the raw material

which the Savoye is the canoni

of their craft. It was just a matter of time for photographers to become architects.

The event in Tschumi's advertisement

cal symbol. Tschumi exposes

In his recent installation for the Serpentine Gallery in Londo n, Demand

not simply the fate of the building but the image culture

has taken the walls of the structure, almost domestic in scale, of the classical classical tea pavilion of 1934 that serves as the gallery and covered them with ivy wallpaper in

in which the building was, the

beginning, sus

manner of William Morris. The inside becomes an ourside, as if the pavilion had been turned inside out.

pended. In this almost surgical

The wallpaper is produced and hung in a way that emphasizes the mate-

move, he approaches exactly

of the paper, the sense that it has been c ut from a roll, leaving visible sc scams. ams.

same limit as do Demand's

I feel the importance, Demand writes in his his notes for the project, that it doe doess

photographs. While Demand

not appear as printed offset (like phoro wallpaper or billboards) bur matte, paper

lifts an architecture out of a

ish and on rolls. rolls. A consu mer item. If photographs hang on it we need the uncoated

media image only to destroy

of he material to make a visible distinction. Also the pat tern will not match

that architecture immediately

on the sides: so the cuts will be prominent. Which makes it more collage-ish. ll The Serpentine Gallery Gallery has been turned into a one-to-one model, a pa-

after the photograph is

Tschumi constructs a n ew ar

structure turned outside in. That's why Demand so much wanted it to feel like

chitecture out of the moment

paper, to look like paper, to bare its seams as if following Gottfried Semper's mid

an earlier one collapses. More

nineteenth-century dictum th at architecture is actually defined by the cladding on

precisely, if the Villa Savoye

the walls walls rather than by the structure that holds the cladding up. It is the thinnest

was designed to produce a cer

decorative layer that produces space. Semper, like the Smithsons, traced the ori

tain image for the media, the

gins of permanent architecture back to temporary installations of fabrics on a

decay of the building is the

scaffolding in the open landscape for festivals:

decay of that image. The crack-

ig. 9. Bernard T chumi, Advertisements Advertisements for Architecture 1976

all th

th

flaking facade is literally the cracking and flaking of a

The festival and frills that indicate

photograph.

tivity and enhance the glorification

mor

of

scaffolding scaffol ding with precisely the occasion the

d

y ~ c o v e r e d

special

forth

fes-

with decorations

 

72

Media as Modern Architecture

Beatriz Colomina

draped wit h

10. Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric:

dressed with boughs and flowers, adorned with

festoons and garlands fluttering banners and trophies this of the

s

II. 12.

Thomas Demand, conversation conversation with the author, May

Elements

means. In working with images, and decorative images of ivy precisely, Demand

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

In

building his images, he is

by chance, one of the new works shown

these ivy walls is

Not

Tavern, a

of photographs based on the press images of a building

on

in which a young boy was held hostage never

and the crime had

no

witnesses,

gate" image disseminated by the press. Demand's series symptomatically includes an

image of ivy growing over the murderous building in Burbach.

Cladding on cladding. Image

on

image. Building on building.

A version of this essay first appeared in Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, I.

2006 .

Thomas Demand, quoted in franc,:ois Quintin, "There in No Innocent Room," in Thomas Demand

(London and New York: Thames

Hudson,

2000 ,

53.

2. A Thousand Words: Thomas Deman d Talks Talks about Poft,

rtforum 39 (May

3. Alison and Peter Smithson, "Staging the Possible," in Italian Thoughts (n. p.,

earlier version of he same argument in "The Masque and the Exhibition:

144-45.

r6. See also the Toward the Real,"

International Laboratorv of  rchitecturean dUrban Design Yearbook 4. Robert Smithson,

in Beauiz Colomina , "Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter

Smithson," October 94

24·

from Barcelona reviewing the DaVlllon.

5. Unnamed local local

Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion," Revisions 2 guest-edited

in J.

Beatriz Colom ina

"Fear of Princcton

Architectural Press Press,, 1988), 130. 6. For the reception of the Barcelona Pavilion, see Juan Pablo

Study

Systems in

rchitecture (Ncw York: Rizzoli International,

131-74·

7. Wolf Tegethoff, "From Obscurity to Maturity," in Franz Schultze, ed., Mies van kr Rohe: Critical 1989), 57- 58. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989),

8. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, (994), 56-57.

9. Heinrich Kulka, quoted in ibid., 269.

2006.

Gottfried Semper, "Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics," in The Four

All the monumental force of architecture is generated by the most insubstantial

really building.

n rchitectural esthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1974), 10-11.

the motive

monument.12  monument.12  

engages directly with the greatest force of building.

73

Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann

 

This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference "Architectur "Architecturee

Between Spectacle and Use," held 2 9

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Contents

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Introduction Vidler

VII

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