Theorizing the anti-avant-garde : invocations of phenomenology in architectural discourse, 1945-1989

Abstract

My dissertation is an intellectual history of "phenomenology," as it came to be understood within architectural discourse during the Cold War. The principal thesis is that contacts with phenomenology were at the crux of the 1970s shift from modernist to postmodernist thinking in architecture. I support this thesis through critical analyses of the work of Ernesto Rogers, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton, who are largely credited with introducing phenomenology to architecture, and with the expansion of the debates on Postmodern architecture to include issues of human-environment relations, such as the social function of traditional building practices, and place-bound identity politics. At present their invocations of phenomenology are often charged with a naive essentialism generally understood to be inconsistent with postmodern thought. This dissertation takes issue with that simplistic view by providing a more complete account of their contributions to architectural thinking. It situates each author in the context of the historical emergence of a new type of architectural avant-garde practice, that of the historian, which to this day has received little scholarly attention. I argue that they are important transitional figures, whose work is enframed by both the closing stages of a postwar modernist understanding of architecture and the opening stages of postmodernist epistemologies. Around their interest in phenomenology cohered an intellectual formation that I call the anti-avant-garde, to situate it within the 1970s debates concerning the terms of architectural avant-gardism.

(cont.) The anti-avant-garde opposed the autonomy of practice or theory, charging equally against the formalism of neo-avant-garde architects such as Peter Eisenman, and against the self-sufficiency of theory proclaimed by critical historians like Manfredo Tafuri. Instead, the anti-avant-garde asserted a theory of "authentic" experience, in which theory and practice became indistinguishable. I argue that this put the anti-avant-garde in the contradictory position of having to efface its own theorizing. This dissertation critically evaluates the anti-avant-garde's full impact in architectural thinking and pedagogy by laying bare its theoretical program.