“the new space” with Le Corbusier’s con- 9. See Josef Frank, “How to Plan a House” (ca.
a House” (ca. not confine the Smithsons to a stylistic mold.
cept of promenade architectural, it would
have been illuminating if he had analyzed
further how these theories manifested dif-
ferently in specific buildings. Despite this
minor issue, this rigorous and focused
study adds critical insights and nuances to
the scholarship on Viennese modernism
and contributes a refreshing and significant
perspective to the discussion of modernist
space making. Long’s articulate descriptions
of spatial experience and cogent analysis of
its underlying strategies enhance our under-
standing of subjectivity and architecture.
XIANGNAN XIONG
Southern University of Science and Technology
Notes
1. See Christopher Long, Josef Frank: Life and Work
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
2. See Iris Meder and Evi Fuchs, eds., Oskar
Strnad 1879–1935 (Vienna: Anton Pustet, 2007).
On Strnad’s life and work, see Otto Niedermoser,
Oskar Strnad 1879–1935 (Vienna: Bergland,
1965); Juliane Stoklaska, “Oskar Strnad” (PhD
diss., Universitä t Wien, 1959).
3. Long’s discussion relies primarily on three
critical texts by Schmarsow: Das Wesen der archi-
tektonischen Schöpfung: Antrittvorlesung gehalten
in der Aula der K. Universitä t Leipzig am 8. No-
vember 1893 (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann,
1894); Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am
Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter kritisch
erörtert und in systematischem Zusammenhange
dargestellt (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1905); and
“Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektoni-
schen Schöpfung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und
allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9 (1914), 66–95.
4. See Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formge-
fühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Herm.
Credner, 1873); Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Prob-
lem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg:
Heitz & Mündel, 1893).
5. English translations of both essays, “Einiges
Theoretische zur Raumgestaltung” (“A Few The-
oretical Thoughts on the Arrangement of Space”)
and “Gedanken beim Entwurf eines Grundrisses”
(“Thoughts on Designing a Ground Plan”), are
included in the appendix to Long’s book.
6. See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity:
Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); Beatriz Colomina, “Inti-
macy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos,”
AA Files 20 (Autumn 1990), 5–15.
7. Josef Frank, “Das Haus als Weg und Platz,” Der
Baumeister 29 (August 1931): 316–23. An English
translation of this essay, “The House as Path and
Place,” is included in the appendix to The New
Space.
8. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in
Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rywert, Neil Leach, and
Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press,
1988), 119.
1942), excerpts of which are included in the ap-
pendix to Long’s book. Also see Josef Frank,
“Accidentism,” Form 54 (1958), 160–65.
M. Christine Boyer
Not Quite Architecture: Writing
around Alison and Peter Smithson
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017, 483 pp.,
25 color and 80 b/w illus. $44.95 (cloth),
ISBN 9780262035514
Robin Hood Gardens (1972), the London
housing estate that realized the urban prin-
ciples of Peter and Alison Smithson, is now
in the process of being literally and figura-
tively deconstructed. As would suit a pair of
architects whose professional careers began
with musings over the “as found” rubble of
postwar London, the Victoria and Albert
Museum has stepped in to salvage a
three-story section of the structure from
the demolition site. The segment, despite
the curatorial conservation of its fittings
and cabinetry, is no arbitrarily, or even pro-
grammatically, determined fragment: it
represents a full iteration of the repeated
graphic sequence that once formed the
building’s façade. This pattern of prefabri-
cated parts preserves the centrality of the
representational method that was as funda-
mental to the Smithsons’ practice as were
off-the-shelf materials.
The graphology of this reliquary also
encapsulates the spirit of the disproportio-
nate quantity of historical research into the
Smithsons and their work that has been
conducted over the past few decades. Much
has been made of the Smithsons’ commen-
tary on the compilation of advertisements,
as well as their affection for raw industrial
materiality. Scholars, myself included, have
deployed interactions of the couple with
the politics of the discipline at home and
abroad to preserve a portrait of an era that
is both peculiarly British and central to the
devolution of mainstream modernism. The
universality of the particular was a strong
theoretical suit of the Smithsons and per-
haps the source of their current intellectual
appeal. They described the thresholds
crossed in the journey from home and
neighborhood to the collective enterprise of
the city as an ascending scale of interactions
that grew increasingly conceptual in nature.
Associational philosophy, furthermore, did
It could generate the starkness on display in
the Hunstanton School (1954) as well as the
contextual urbanism of the Economist
Building (London, 1964). The Economist’s
courtyard was thus the perfect stage for
the opening sequence (clowns included) of
director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first En-
glish production, Blow-Up (1966), a film that
investigated the forensic conditions of image
culture while capturing the singularity of
London in the sixties. In much the same way,
the Smithsons moved fluidly from somber
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declarations on “habitat” (1954) and the
future of modern architecture at CIAM to
ironic visions for the imminent future, such
as the one presented in their House of the
Future for the Daily Mail–sponsored Ideal
Home Exhibition of 1956. In the Smithsons’
world, images of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn
Monroe could populate the same CIAM
grille as pictures of working-class children
at play.
Following the precedent set by the
subjects, much of the scholarship on the
Smithsons has prioritized their fixation
with imagery. M. Christine Boyer studi-
ously avoids this lead, as well as much of
the secondary literature, in her recent
contribution to this research area with
Not Quite Architecture: Writing around Ali-
son and Peter Smithson. This elision makes
for a baffling read at times, especially when
the work of others bolsters Boyer’s own
sentiments. The alibi for this lacuna in
what is an otherwise comprehensive text is,
perhaps, that the focus here is on some-
thing different—that is, the extensive cor-
pus of the writing authored by and
around the Smithsons. Boyer has indeed
burrowed deep into the archives and pro-
duced a painstaking work that brings a
trove of unpublished material to light. This
archival specificity provides a useful coun-
terbalance to the body of more speculative
work that has been done on the postwar
period. The outcome of Not Quite Architec-
ture, however, its oppositional pose not-
withstanding, does not serve for the most
part to redirect the interpretive work of
others. Rather, it contributes to and elabo-
rates on our understanding of the Smithsons.
Boyer deftly weaves together strands
that until now have had to be assembled
piecemeal from a variety of sources on
British postwar modernism into a coherent
narrative that will be particularly useful to
BOOKS 355
a reader looking to situate the practice of
Alison and Peter Smithson in its larger
ideological context. First, she outlines the
milieu that informed the Smithsons’ think-
ing in terms of the polemics of the period,
especially as they were expressed on the
pages of the Architectural Review and Archi-
tectural Design. She presents a close reading
of the debate over the New Brutalism, in
which Reyner Banham (standing in perhaps
for all other critics of his ilk) appears in what
will be a recurring and ill-suited role as vil-
lain. Another anticipated theme, that of
Americanisme, frames the interaction of the
Smithsons with the Independent Group and
its related activities. Excursions to the sub-
jects of fashion and the automobile quickly
deliver the reader back to the solid footing
of the agitational role that the Smithsons
played at CIAM.
In the last set of chapters, Boyer makes
the most of the assertion that appears early
on in Not Quite Architecture: “I will make
the case that Alison and Peter Smithson
were in fact eminently English architects,
always susceptible to the English Pictur-
esque and to consideration of the landscape
and site (place) and how it operates as a lo-
cus of memory” (33–34). That the Smith-
sons were in many ways, including by
their own admission, quintessential prod-
ucts of their English environment is an em-
inently defensible claim that holds far
beyond the scope of aesthetic theory, right
from their long journey south to embark
on their shared career. The picturesque is
certainly the most English of architectural
theories. But Boyer’s contention that the
picturesque “operates as a locus of mem-
ory” goes against the grain of the tradi-
tional understanding of the picturesque as
a highly representational mode of knowl-
edge. Her unique stance guides the reading
of the Smithsons’ output from the 1970s
and 1980s, the period during which there is
little in the way of built work, in interesting
and unexpected ways. It is in these chap-
ters, full of thought-provoking and colorful
material, that the work most expands our
understanding of this prolific couple.
Not Quite Architecture, then, has ap-
peared at a critical moment in the reassess-
ment of the Smithsons’ oeuvre. It provides
an overview of an extensive array of docu-
ments in a manner that is useful for anyone
interested in the theoretical landscape of
postwar modernism and the sensibility of
356 JSAH | 77.3 | SEPTEMBER 2018
the British context. It brings unpublished
material to light and is driven by a lucid, if
contestable, conjecture about Englishness.
The book is also eminently accessible, a fact
that serves to highlight its lack of intuition
regarding the nature of representation,
which was so central to the Smithsons’ con-
cerns. There is a sense that battle lines are
being drawn here, although it is not clear
from the book what is at stake. Not Quite
Architecture, for example, does not propose
any particular approach to writing or read-
ing architecture in its bifurcation of the field
into image and text. One’s own prose is by
necessity also a part of a discourse with the
writing of others. It is to the advantage of
this work and the field that these lines be
eliminated.
HADAS A . STEINER
State University of New York at Buffalo
Léa-Catherine Szacka
Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980
Venice Architecture Biennale
Venice:Marsilio Editore, 2016, 264 pp., 64 color
and 71 b/w illus. $28.76/€30 (paper),
ISBN 9788831726726
Few historical investigations have accom-
plished the dual task of writing the history
of a significant postmodern architectural
moment while simultaneously unpacking
its defining theoretical concepts. Maybe
that historical period is still too close to
our own. Or perhaps documenting an our-
oboric movement such as postmodernism,
one that centered on history and the revival
of architectural styles, is itself the problem.
Among the first books to confront the
history of postmodern architecture were
Reinhold Martin’s Utopia’s Ghost, Michael
Hays’s Architecture’s Desire, and Emmanuel
Petit’s Irony; or, The Self-Critical Opacity of
Postmodern Architecture.1 These, however,
were more concerned with revisiting themes
of postmodern theory than with filling signif-
icant historical gaps. In Architecture’s Histori-
cal Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the
Postmodern, Jorge Otero-Pailos accomplishes
the goal of filling such gaps by tackling the
postmodern approach toward history and the
injection of phenomenology into the disci-
pline of architecture, although his book is
unusual in this regard.2
In Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980
Venice Architecture Biennale, Léa-Catherine
Szacka meets the challenge of writing about
postmodern architectural history while
teasing out its theoretical concepts through
an investigation of a pivotal moment: the
founding of the first Venice Architecture
Biennale in 1980.3 Szacka’s selection of
this event, description of its political origins,
and formidable analysis of the inaugural
Biennale reframe this occasion as the per-
fect vehicle through which to study critical
themes of postmodern architecture and ar-
chitectural exhibitions.
For Szacka, the first Venice Architec-
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ture Biennale, directed and curated by
the Italian architect and educator Paolo
Portoghesi, was the most significant in-
ternational architecture exhibition since
the Werkbund Weissenhofsiedlung in
Stuttgart in 1927 or the Modern Architec-
ture: International Exhibition at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Titled
The Presence of the Past, the exhibition was
held in the restored Venetian industrial
complex of the Corderie dell’Arsenale
and featured the work of more than eighty
participants from across Europe and the
United States. A key section contained the
iconic Strada Novissima, an indoor, “theat-
rical” street with twenty multicolored fa-
çades designed by an international cohort
of architects and constructed, ironically, by
set designers and technicians recruited from
Rome’s Cinecittà film studios. The Biennale,
according to Szacka, responded to the mute
architecture of the modern movement, dem-
onstrating how architecture could return to
the past and regain its social function as
a means of communication—as language.
Also, the event used a theatrical, urban appa-
ratus, inspired by the pedestrian street, to
signal a return to collective urban space and
its sense of place. The Biennale’s curator and
exhibition committee sought to create a
show that would instigate intellectual de-
bates within the discipline while also serving
as a media event focused on architecture, one
that would encourage public participation.
Szacka’s historical examination of the
Biennale grows from her meticulous cull-
ing of archival materials and her use of oral
history—in particular, a series of thirty-
seven interviews with Biennale committee
members and exhibition participants. The
textual narrative is accompanied by original
photographs that range from marketing
and publicity images to behind-the-scenes
views.