The Journal of Architecture

ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

The Project of Autonomy: Politics within and

against Capitalism; Architecture's Desire: Reading
the late Avant-garde; Utopia's Ghost: Architecture
and Postmodernism, Again; First Works: Emerging
Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s &
1970s

Charles Rice

To cite this article: Charles Rice (2011) The Project of Autonomy: Politics within and against
Capitalism; Architecture's Desire: Reading the late Avant-garde; Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and
Postmodernism, Again; First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s,
The Journal of Architecture, 16:1, 155-163, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2011.547027

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2011.547027

Published online: 13 Feb 2011.

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The Project of Autonomy: Politics within and against
Capitalism
By Pier Vittorio Aureli
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008
ISBN 9781568987941
$77, hardback, pp. 88, with colour illustrations
Architecture’s Desire: Reading the late Avant-garde
By K. Michael Hays
The MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 9780262513029
$20, paperback, pp. 192, with colour and b&w
illustrations
Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism,
Again
By Reinhold Martin
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
ISBN, 9780816669639
$25, paperback, pp. 272, with b&w illustrations
First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimen-
tation of the 1960s & 1970s
Edited by Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzales de
Canales
Architectural Association Publications, 2009
ISBN 978-1902902814
£40, hardback, pp. 284, with colour and b&w illus-
trations
The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have recently become
prominent in architectural research. As with newly
declassified government documents, perhaps
# 2011 The Journal of Architecture
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enough time has passed for intrigue, controversies
and momentous events to be examined as part of
the historical record. But relevant historical studies
in architecture do not simply cast a backward
glance on past events. These recent titles present
some of the more important ways in which the
material of these decades has come to define con-
temporary debate in the discipline. First Works:
Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the
1960s & 1970s documents the beginnings of an
array of well-known architects, many of whom
now occupy the topmost ranks of the profession.
Rather than simply celebrating early careers in the
light of subsequent success, the collection attempts
to repair the supposed theory/practice split by situ-
ating the development of architectural knowledge
within design projects. Architecture’s Desire:
Reading the late Avant-garde gives a definitive
theoretical account of the luminaries of the late-
or neo-avant-garde: Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter
Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. The latter two are
still very much present in the discipline, and, with
the exception of Hejduk, all appear in First Works.
The Project of Autonomy: Politics within and
against Capitalism examines the relationships
between politics and architecture in Italy in the
1960s, and here Rossi is a prominent figure,
though he is situated in relation to a range of politi-
cal theorists in order to reflect upon the concrete
relations architecture might have with politics.
Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism,
Again deals with that most thorny concept, one
which the contemporary discipline would most like
1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2011.547027
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to see well behind it: postmodernism. Yet rather
than consign the concept to history or celebrate
the endurance of a pop legacy, the book probes
the way in which the discursive formation known
as postmodernism continues to structure architec-
ture’s relationships with power.
Perhaps because of the appearance of key figures
across several of the titles, a differentiated field of
debate emerges clearly; that different things can
be said about the same people or examples is key
to the formation of a contemporary debate. The
fact that the material from these decades is histori-
cal—let’s call it the ‘declassified documents’
effect—means that debate can be managed
through a process of exposing more and more
material to the scrutiny of the present, and,
perhaps, in this way, direct skirmishes amongst con-
temporary figures are avoided.
One concept does emerge as crucial to all of these
titles: autonomy. While it is not exclusive to the
events of these decades, autonomy has gained a
renewed relevance in terms of how architecture
manages its relationships to the complexity of
what might be called its ‘external engagements’.
In other words, what is the relation between the
conditions that might define architecture as such,
and those by which it engages with social, economic
and political contexts?
In Architecture’s Desire, K. Michael Hays
approaches the question of autonomy in it its
‘purest’ architectural expression: the late avant-
garde as defined by the work of Eisenman, Rossi,
Hejduk, and Tschumi. This avant-garde turned
inward on the discipline in an effort to explore and
systematise the language it had inherited from the
avant-garde of the early twentieth century. For
Hays, this inward focus defines architecture’s auton-
omy, its existence separate from the exigencies of its
external relations. Yet this inward focus also defines
these external relations. As Hays puts it, architecture
provides the ‘imaginary “solution” to a real social
situation and contradiction . . . that is what is
meant by its autonomy’ (Hays, p. 1). For the archi-
tects Hays analyses, this solution is not simply an
alternative proposition, but an internalisation
within the discipline of the social situations and con-
tradictions with which architecture engages. The
resultant, supposedly mute, empty forms of Eisen-
man or Rossi manifest directly the results of this
internalisation: ‘it is the very form in which a
certain lack assumes existence, the form necessary
to imagine a radical lack in the real itself.’ (Hays,
p. 11). Repetitions of form and manipulations of
technique replace progress and direct engagement
with the material world. In discussing Eisenman,
for example, Hays suggests that he ‘understands
our most elaborate imaginative efforts to conjure
alternatives or to propose the next New as little
more than projections out of our own historical pre-
dicament.’ (Hays, p. 62).
We might understand this in more general terms
as architecture developing a language of criticality:
architecture comments on the world rather than
constructing it. Hays’ Lacanian formulations then
reroute this criticality through the endlessly
deferred circuits of desire. In analysing Hejduk’s
projects and in particular his obsessions over the
wall as architectural element, Hays constructs a
complex logic of the gaze operating in the work.
The wall becomes projecting screen, architecture’s

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mask, its point of mediation between the look of
the real and its own self-presentation, an image
of and for negotiation that keeps the possibility of
architecture alive through the proffered question
‘what do you want of me?’ (Hays, p. 27). And in
a masterly reading of Tschumi’s work, which has
been the subject of surprisingly little analysis, Hays
again specifies a particularly architectural desire:
‘Architecture, then, has everything to do with a par-
ticular impulse finding its representation—and
thereby its sensual expression and libidinal invest-
ment—in different media, and is only contingently
related to the composition of a building.’ (Hays,
pp. 136– 7).
Tschumi is perhaps the odd one out in this
quartet. His work does not stand so much for intro-
spection as a radically extroverted form of engage-
ment, form and programme as the result of
contingent events. Yet Hays’s analysis of Tschumi
re-describes the question of architecture’s auton-
omy. If, Hays argues, the central tenet of autonomy
has to do with the given-ness of architecture’s
material—that there really is nothing new to
invent, but only a repetition and reworking of
what is given—then Tschumi’s own repetitions of
architecture’s material, whether it be the Villa
Savoye in his Advertisements for Architecture
(1975), drawings as notational sequences in the
Manhattan Transcripts (1976– 81), or the quasi-
Constructivist follies of Parc de la Villette (1982),
are underpinned by the condition of autonomy.
In this work
it is as if through a spacing and exteriorisation of
architecture’s autonomy we have already tun-
neled through to the other side, to the side of
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effects, . . . finding within the autonomy project
a practice that tries to keep faith with some
more fundamental state of contingency, delirium,
and euphoria of repetition rather than either an
affirmation of form [Eisenman] or a melancholy
of loss [Hejduk, Rossi]. (Hays, p. 149.)
Thus, for Tschumi, we have not the negativity of a
critical project (against which it has recently been
so easy to call for a post-critical sense of ‘engage-
ment’) but the relationship between architecture’s
given material and the question of desire, now to
be understood as the very limit architecture always
seeks to confront. And this field of desire Hays
calls the City, a concept which forms the link
between these four architects. Tschumi’s Manhattan
and the Venice of Eisenman, Hejduk and Rossi stand
forth as the prime sites of architecture’s desire:
always already given, yet demanding a response to
architecture’s question: ‘what do you want of
me?’ While Tschumi’s answer is, in some ways,
ecstatic, Hays understands Rossi’s architecture to
suggest that ‘the time of architecture’s fulfillment
has passed’ (Hays, p. 17). And in a way not so differ-
ent from Tschumi, the tracing out of this fulfil-
ment—constantly deferred—is what is left for, and
as, architecture.
Rossi has been seen as the major proponent of
typology, one of the key theoretical formulations
of the 1960s and 1970s. Hays’ account demystifies
this concept at the same time as he complicates its
architectural application. Without simply holding
and preserving the memory of architecture’s past,
type acts as a mediator between abstract architec-
tural structuring and material instantiation. Type
desires the City. As Hays writes:
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While the City cannot be deduced from any single
example of architecture, and every possible ana-
logue of the City is necessarily partial and often
contradictory, there is nevertheless no architec-
ture that is not determined and legitimated by
the City, which is the very structuring of architec-
ture’s tradition. (Hays, p. 33.)
Tradition, in Rossi’s terms, is what is given in archi-
tecture. It is not the ‘past’ so much as the structuring
of any future possibility. Type, then, is a way of med-
iating between this sense of inheritance and the
response architecture gives, in its repetitions, to
the City.
In explicating architecture’s desire, there is some-
thing performative in Hays’ own work. The theoreti-
cal account produces the works’ autonomy, the
complex structuring of their relationships to real
conditions. In this way Hays’ work is purely theoreti-
cal, and can demand a relation to the present on
those terms: architecture’s desire is not a question
of historical specificity but one that continues to
define the discipline in its autonomy. The late
avant-garde represents not a phase but a pathologi-
cal condition. Hence one might imagine more archi-
tects being added to this quartet, but one also
understands how these architects exemplify the
problem of autonomy. They are case studies in the
clinical sense. They provide particulars which orient
the structuring of knowledge in the discipline, and
their case histories can be revisited for fresh insights
relative to newly emerging problems.
As internally consistent as Hays’ account is in this
way, it does beg the question: what else is there to
say about the work of these architects? Is ‘architec-
ture’s desire’ one among many apparatuses of
interpretation, or is the whole problem of interpret-
ation a symptom of architecture’s desire?
A way of departing from this framework—and let
us imagine for a moment this is possible, without, as
it were, answering the question—is given in Pier
Vittorio Aureli’s thoroughly historical account of
autonomy. In The Project of Autonomy Aureli does
not claim it for the discipline of architecture, but
rather for ‘a political subject committed to the
formation of a cultural alternative to the bourgeois
domination of the capitalist city’ (Aureli, p. 55). It
is here that Rossi is positioned as a ‘theoretician’
of the city, committed to the formation of this
cultural alternative. Aureli focuses Rossi’s theory of
the locus as a politically committed strategy to
‘reappropriate the legacy of the bourgeois city as
the form of the socialist city’ (Aureli, p. 57). The
lack Hays saw Rossi’s project revealing in its desire
for the city is here dealt with in terms of a politically
engaged theory. Rossi developed the concept of
locus to counter the prevailing political understand-
ing of the city, and processes of urbanisation and
urban planning, which were integrative and totalis-
ing, and which thus mapped directly onto ideologies
of capitalist development.
What is most interesting about Aureli’s short and
precise study is the way he connects his theoretical
argumentation about a specific strand of political
thinking to the historical circumstances of key archi-
tectural projects. Autonomy then becomes vital in
the formation of an historically situated and
complex field of action in which architecture is impli-
cated through its projective capacity. Autonomy
becomes autonomy for a political subject, rather
than a disciplinary autonomy from a context of

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action. He uses this formulation as a way of rethink-
ing figures such as Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri, who,
Aureli argues, have tended to be lumped together
with figures such as Eisenman and Colin Rowe as
articulating a ‘strategic retreat, a refusal to reform
the existing world.’ (Aureli, p. 12). Aureli begins to
separate the concerns of Tafuri and Rossi, and to
consider Rossi’s politics in the context of the political
theorist Mario Tronti, whose concept of autonomy
was one for the workers within capitalism, one not
of destroying capitalism and bourgeois values, ‘but
rather an audacious effort to appropriate the politi-
cal realm in order to construct an alternative to capi-
talist domination.’ (Aureli, p. 14). This, then, is not
so much a politicisation of architecture as an effort
to theorise architecture’s response to the city in pol-
itical terms.
The compelling nature of Aureli’s argument, like
that of Hays—even though they part on the ques-
tion of autonomy—is that it accounts for projects
conventionally considered to belong to different
axes of political allegiance or experimental interest.
In an illuminating reading of Andrea Branzi’s No-
Stop City project, completed under the aegis of
the Florentine group Archizoom, Aureli positions
the project in the same terms as Rossi’s claim for
the autonomy of theory. As Aureli argues, in its pres-
entation of an endless infrastructure for the servi-
cing of work and life, ‘Archizoom sought to
[propose] a deliberately cynical realism concerning
the diabolical forces of capitalism, and to posit
the idea that, if objectively represented, they
might become an actual weapon by which the
working class could take possession and power.’
(Aureli, p. 72).
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The totalising effect of the integrative force of
capitalist planning and urbanism is demystified
through the presentation of its potential ad absur-
dum, to the point where the system breaks down
and allows what Archizoom called ‘wild realities’
to emerge. But, as Aureli observes, No-Stop City is
a city without architecture, which is precisely
where it would differ both from Rossi, but also
from groups such as fellow Florentines Superstudio,
and Archigram, of which its own name is a kind of
lampoon. In the radical nature of Branzi’s proposal,
architecture’s desire is short-circuited in order for a
politically engaged position to unfold through its
literal drawing out. Or perhaps, in a way prefiguring
Tschumi, Branzi has ‘tunneled through to the other
side, to the side of effects, . . . finding within the
autonomy project a practice that tries to keep faith
with some more fundamental state of contingency,
delirium, and euphoria of repetition[.]’ (Hays,
p. 149).
Almost all of the architects discussed so far
appear in Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzales de
Canales’ First Works. The book presents twenty pro-
jects from what Steele, in his introduction to the col-
lection, describes as ‘a full cross-section of a
remarkable generation of critical architectural prac-
tices, indicating their arrival in the form of their first-
ever architectural works, all undertaken during the
1960s and 70s.’ (Steele and Gonzales de Canales,
p. 7). These projects are contextualised and inter-
preted by short texts from architects and academics.
In a way that would seem consistent with Aureli’s
analysis of Branzi’s project, Steele and Gonzales de
Canales aim to find the critical—supposedly the
domain of theory—in the practice, and in particular
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in works from which a future projection can
(perhaps only in hindsight) be understood. They
argue that examining these works can help go
beyond the artificial distinction between theory
and practice that has taken hold since the late
1960s.
These ‘first works’ are of interest because they
show that the ‘undertaking of a building project
was the basis for the discovery and invention not
just of new architectural theories, but of architec-
tural knowledge itself.’ (Steele and Gonzales de
Canales, p. 8). Steele claims the importance of
such knowledge as against constructions of the
field that have relied on the written word, that is,
since the emergence of architectural theory since
the late 1960s (Hays’ anthology Architecture
Theory Since 1968, published in 2000, is implicated
here). Though the attempt is to consider theory and
practice before their supposed artificial division,
practice wins out, and first projects in particular, as
the progenitors of new knowledge. This is what is
often called the ‘practice-led’ approach to the pro-
duction of knowledge, and it falls squarely on the
side of ‘engagement’, rather than ‘autonomy’.
Yet the fate of the written word is interesting to
track through one project in particular. Aureli has
contributed to First Works a short piece on Aldo
Rossi, Luca Meda and Gianugo Polesello’s project
Locomotiva 2: Competition Entry for a Directional
Centre [Central Business District], Turin, Italy
(1962). First Works reproduces the original project
statement of Rossi, Meda and Polesello, which
describes the project in dry, rationalised and func-
tional terms. The drawings share this dryness,
explaining the massive form as simultaneously a
circuit of flows and a containing device. Aureli’s
commentary on the project then positions it as a cri-
tique of the competition’s premises for a consoli-
dated business district outside the historic core of
the city, and the prevailing architectural solution of
the mega-structure. The project’s deliberately
closed, non-expandable, and therefore un-mega-
structure-like form, is then understood by Aureli as
‘an analogous reconstruction of the grid [of
Roman Turin]—in other words, the grid reinter-
preted as a typological theme. It was thus not a
rehabilitation of the norm but an analogical use of
the norm as a form of exception.’ (Aureli in Steele
and Gonzales de Canales, p. 89). The way Aureli dis-
cussed its rejection by the competition jury—the
scheme was ‘labeled “a Stalinist court for mass
execution”’ (Aureli in Steele and Gonzales de
Canales, p. 89)—positions its criticality right in
the historical moment of the project’s political
engagement.
This project also features on the cover of Hays’
Architecture’s Desire, and in a note at the end of
the book he uses it to encapsulate the book’s argu-
ment. For Hays, the project stands for precisely an
internalised, rather than directly politicised, oper-
ation of criticality. The point is not that interpret-
ation is variable, and therefore up for grabs, but
rather that projects are a kind of ground for the
theoretical re-examination of the discipline, which,
at least in the case of these, now historical projects,
is not simply given in the work, but is rewritten into
and out of it. The project and the written word,
while colluding, are not fused together. If anything,
First Works shows precisely the way in which the-
ories of the discipline are constructed historically

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through writing. While it is certainly an interesting
revisiting of projects, some much less well-known
than others, First Works perhaps only points to
the differences between the designed project
and the written word, and how, and why, they
might move in and out of phase with each other.
Yet, in orchestrating their particular conjunction
in the present, Steele and Gonzales de Canales’
editorial policy is thus strategic in setting up the
emergence of certain projects whose relevance is
measured against the contemporary interest in
practice as the site of architectural knowledge.
While it would want to get past the repetitions of
the autonomy ‘project’, or the embarrassments of
stylistic postmodernism, on both counts First
Works can be seen to be symptomatic of the
working of postmodernism as it is developed by
Reinhold Martin in Utopia’s Ghost. Martin’s project
is to understand postmodernism as a discursive for-
mation, rather than a distinct style or set of
approaches one could choose, or not. The supposed
fragmentation of the discipline ‘after’ the failure of
the modern project is underwritten by a more devel-
oped, integral functioning of capitalism, a function-
ing the political practices Aureli investigates were
trying to overcome. Again autonomy figures as a
way to consider architecture’s relationship to post-
modernism.
For Martin, autonomy works in a complicated
mode. Far from simply signalling a retreat, ‘architec-
ture’s participation in heterogeneous networks of
power, including biopower, actually increases with
its withdrawal into private games played in an eso-
teric language. . . . This is how to understand archi-
tecture’s “autonomy”. It is also how architecture
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makes power real, rather than the other way
around.’ (Martin, p. xiv). And further, ‘autonomous’
architecture is ‘reentering the culture industry via
the back door as autonomous form’ in signature,
iconic buildings (Martin, p. xxi). Understanding this
re-entry goes beyond the context of Hays’ argu-
ment, but it is perhaps the promise that was sig-
nalled by many of the first works in Steele and
Gonzales de Canales’ collection. The contemporary
‘cultural presence’ of architecture can be seen in
these first works, so long as a theory/practice split
does not cloud one’s vision. In other words, to
accept the primacy of the project in the way Steele
and Gonzales de Canales do is to accept its trajec-
tory into cultural prominence in what Martin calls
signature architecture.
Martin’s version of a theory/practice split is cast
somewhat differently, and has to do with the fate
of utopian thinking. As he writes, ‘Utopia stands
ultimately for an entire system of representation
and production that is no longer available to archi-
tecture, rather than as an idol whose enchantments
led modernism astray.’ (Martin, p. xvii). For Martin,
utopian thinking would stand apart from instrumen-
tal action in much same way as an architecture of
autonomy would provide the ‘imaginary “solution”
to a real social situation and contradiction’ (Hays,
p. 1). Yet Hays’ quartet of the late avant-garde are
not utopians. Indeed, for Martin, the ‘architecture
of autonomy’ is a symptom of this obliteration of
utopian possibility within the discipline. Martin
wants to recapture a projective capacity for architec-
ture, but one that does not either reproduce given
structures or relationships, nor their contradictions
within the frame of the discipline’s own repetitions
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of its given material. Martin’s sense of utopian possi-
bility is thus perhaps closest to Aureli’s sense of an
autonomy for a political subject. It would be an
engaged political project, using architecture’s
projective capacity to imagine an alternative
proposition.
In his explication of this possibility from within a
pervasive post-modernity, Martin’s book is difficult
going, but does repay close reading. One has the
sense, though, that Martin’s argument is a work
in progress, not through lack of polish, but
because the ambition of the argument is so
great: a reframing of the discipline based on the
recent past that has large implications for both its
historical and theoretical analysis, as well as for
practice. For Martin, to reengage utopian thinking
in architecture is not another niche project, or
unexplored territory. It is a reengagement with
the discipline in all its complexity, without any
solace being gained from what the last several
decades have established in architecture’s name.
It is this level of ambition that separates Martin’s
work from the other books under review here.
Hays is on familiar territory, and gives a definitive
reading of the late avant-garde, yet he serves to
perpetuate an obsession with these architects,
one which, in Martin’s words, ‘may very well indi-
cate a foundational insecurity that is far more
revealing than are the ideological expressions of
its protagonists’ (Martin, p. xviii). Through micro-
analysis Aureli brings to light unexamined links
between architectural and political action in a
specific time and place, links which are nonetheless
directed to what Aureli sees as the necessity for
theory in the present.
This is a piece in the puzzle Martin is trying to
assemble, though a crucial one which adds nuance
to Martin’s claims about postmodernism’s discursive
formation. And Steele and Gonzales de Canales’
work is a kind of ‘exhibit A’ in terms of Martin’s
problem, whereby ‘A theory of historical causality,
or of the role and status of the discipline within a
multidisciplinary nexus—to say nothing of a socioe-
conomic field—is hard to come by in the midst of all
the new knowledge being accumulated about what
is known as the “postwar period,” to which archi-
tectural postmodernism supplies a convenient
coda.’ (Martin, p. xviii). Martin ultimately, though,
leaves the reader with a less than satisfying
account of what a reengaged utopian possibility
might be. The final chapter, ‘Utopia’s Ghost’, is the
slightest in the book. Referring to the overwhelming
interiority of John Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaven-
ture Hotel, the spatial analogon for Fredric Jame-
son’s account of a late-capitalist postmodernism, it
is not clear what is meant by Martin’s call for:
new forms of projection, maps that lead to an exit
from such spaces. Rather than projecting
outward, from the architectural object to the
city and to the world, such maps might lead to
an exit or exits deep inside our postmodern night-
mares. Built-in trap doors concealed in the archi-
tecture itself, that, like visors, open onto other,
possible worlds, rather than onto one more
solipsistic prison cell to which one is forever con-
demned, like a Russian matryoshka doll. (Martin,
p. 169.)
What seems to emerge as Martin’s response to this
call are historical projects from the late 1970s and
1980s that present not a totalising utopia, but

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almost its individuation, one figure being the linked
archipelago. This ‘splitting of a ghost into a ghostly
multitude’, he acknowledges, ‘is not without its
own problems’ (Martin, p. 177). There is a clear
reference here to the multitude of Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri’s political manifesto Empire—
for which Aureli provides an illuminating and critical
back-grounding in terms of Italian politics—but a
recognition too of the social and spatial atomisation
such a constitution (or replacement) of collective
subjectivity might imply. But as Martin would no
doubt counter, ghosts are by their nature disembo-
died. Utopia, then, returns as spectre, necessarily
irrecoverable, but nonetheless present as a kind of
guide from and to an ‘other world’.
The presence of the spectre provides another way of
understanding what is given in architecture. It marks
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the return of historical material in a literal haunting
of the present. Whether this ‘given’ is described in
terms of autonomy, the issue arising with utopia’s
ghost is this: what is it possible to think in the
name of architecture? In these terms the circulation
of the works of certain architects amongst these
books is not surprising. They are kinds of ghosts,
but where they lead us is not altogether certain.
What is certain is that the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s provide a horizon for thought which the dis-
cipline is yet to see beyond, and if it did, perhaps it
would no longer be the discipline we know.
Charles Rice
University of Technology
Sydney
Australia