Return of the Living Dead: Archigram And Architecture's Monstrous Media

Author(s): Todd Gannon

Source: Log, No. 13/14, Aftershocks: Generation(s) since 1968 (Fall 2008), pp. 171-180
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Todd Gannon

Return of the Living

Dead: Archigram
And Architecture's
Monstrous Media
As the Modern Movement died in 1919, so too did this neo-func-
tionalism of Archigram die in 1968.
- Peter Eisenman

Forty years on, architecture remains haunted by the specters

of the '60s. Surely you have felt them rustling in a late-night
studio or whispering in a darkened lecture hall. The ghosts
lurk in the shadows of our newest buildings and possess our
pundits. Lately they have been reported swimming in the
pixilated haze of our computer screens. Watch closely - with
the right kind of eyes, you might catch a glimpse as these
restless spirits charge contemporary work with the necrotic
aura of another place, another time.
Normally we write off these spectral sightings as influ-
ence, genealogy, precedent, or quotation. Rarely is the nefar-
ious potential of supernatural activity examined or even
admitted. Before the 20th century, the spirits of the past gen-
erally were understood to be harmless, beneficial, or even
essential. Past practitioners worked to ensure the presence of
ancient ghosts in contemporary work while audiences and
critics applauded their achievements. Even as later historians
detected historical phantoms in the supposedly pure projects
of the 1920s and '30s, their presence generally was accepted
as part and parcel of legitimate creative practice.
But in the 1960s, as a deep suspicion of the status quo
developed through all facets of cultural production, new
forms of supernatural activity were unearthed. And nowhere
did its subversive power come more clearly into focus than
in the grainy black and white of George Romero's 1968 clas-
sic, Night of the Living Dead. Much has already been said
about the film's astute commentary on the turbulent '60s.
Produced by inexperienced filmmakers on a shoestring
budget, the film deployed campy dialogue and cartoonish
effects to raise serious questions about racial and gender
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 stereotypes, senseless violence, blind conformance, the poli-
tics of resistance, and other pressing issues of the day. Such
pointed critique was made possible in large part by the film-
maker's canny choice of supernatural menace. The Night was
plagued neither by the traditional ethereality of ghosts nor
by the uncomplicated corporeality of monsters. Instead,
Romero unleashed a relentless horde of zombies.

Both living and dead, human and beast, familiar and

undeniably other, zombies inhabit the unruly space between
categories and demonstrate the transformative potential
1. As such, zombies prove particularly lurking within us all.1 The zombie is the ordinary individual
well suited to the complex cultural cli-
mate of the '60s. In Romero's classic, transformed by and absorbed into the faceless mob. Maintain-
their presence upsets all the usual tropes. ing the material existence left behind by their spectral
Unable to fend off their relentless attack,
good guys succumb to the zombie horde cousins, zombies pose a more immediate threat than disem-
and damsels in distress are killed off one
bodied spirits. Ghosts merely scare us; zombies bite.
by one. The unlikely survivor/hero, a
resourceful black man in an otherwise While ghosts generally are considered to be part of the
hapless white cast, falls victim to a trig-
natural order, their zombie counterparts usually are the
ger-happy posse too eager to save the day.
Robbed of a traditional happy ending product of human intervention or science gone awry
and shaken by unprecedented gore, we
are left to ponder why, exactly, every-
(Romero's zombies, for example, were caused by radiation
thing seemed to go wrong. from a failed NASA satellite). The message is clear: too much
2. 1 am indebted to N. Katherine Hayles
for suggesting to me the equivalence of
technology leads to trouble - we experiment at everyone's
unbuilt architecture and the undead. See
peril. Yet in architecture as elsewhere, such advice is rarely
our forthcoming "Virtual Architecture,
Actual Media," in Handbook of heeded, and no period saw more unholy experimentation than
Architectural Theory , ed. Arie Graafland
the 1960s. Driven by a pervasive revolutionary Zeitgeist, rad-
(Amsterdam: Sage Press, 2009), which
develops many of the themes outlined ical upstarts in England, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere un-
here.
leashed projects and polemics that shook the discipline to its
core and left in their wake a series of unbuilt and unbuild-
able aberrations - the architectural undead.2

Abominable works like Ron Herron's Walking City,

Superstudio's Continuous Monument, and Hans Hollein's
Aircraft Carrier City are a far cry from the friendly ghosts
that haunt the work of others. More real than the virtual

buildings they are said merely to represent, these subversive

projects ply their effects in this world, not the next. Despite
the efforts of our most vigilant critical exorcists, these archi-
tectural zombies keep coming back, and no body of work has
been more impressive in its consistent refusal to just lie
down and die than that of Archigram.
By most accounts dead and buried by the end of the '60s,
Archigram has since been resurrected by countless critics to
stand as both ally and impediment to all of the major ideo-
logical debates of the last 40 years. The group and its output
have been deployed as a means to resuscitate the "true" spirit
of modernism, to challenge its most revered proponents, to
demonstrate both the virtue and inefficacy of the avant-garde,
to fend off and usher in the rising tides of postmodernism,
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 and to shore up and attack a host of stylistic and t
trends. Indeed, since the group burst onto the scen
early 1960s, it has become impossible to stake out
tectural position without having a position on Ar
even if that position is to denounce or suppress th
Today, a burgeoning digital avant-garde bears s
similarities to the neo-avant-garde of Archigranť
tion, embracing, as did their '60s forebears, cutti
technology, extra- disciplinary expertise, and expe
with nontraditional media. Understanding Archig
monstrous incursions into architecture - a world u

'60s understood to be made up exclusively of build

proves particularly useful to 21st-century practiti
at work concocting contemporary digital demons.
Poster for Night of the Living Archigranťs iconoclastic projects, publications, an
Dead , directed by George were reviled by the orthodox standard bearers of
Romero, 1968. Image courtesy
THE AUTHOR.
so too does the work of today's digital generation
ful condemnations from the establishment. But wh

true 40 years ago remains the case today: These o

works suggest not the dissolution of the disciplin
demonstrate that architecture is a restless spirit
animating material, minds, and media far beyond
********

In nine and one-half epo

1961 to 1974, Archigram
figurable space of the pr
tapose elements, and orc
impossible in other medi
spatial limitations of bui
Archigram members, th
alongside contemporary
and are blurred together
run with abandon across
tively erase hierarchical
elements and actors, enc
3. "Expandability," Archigram 3 (Autumn first voiced in Archigram
1963): np.
We see these technique
Archigram 1 employs tex
architectural objects, bu
sibility from built form
handwritten captions fo
tours of projects by Mik
Greene, and others, in s
the buildings in a form o
niques, Archigram differ
tural publications. In its
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4. "The Zoom Issue," Archigram 4
(Spring/Summer 1964): 4.
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document or describe. Rather, projects and products are
transformed into an alternative architectural milieu, a pre-
sentation of a future world fundamentally different from
the present one.
One possible future is narrated in Archigram 4, the
famous "Zoom Issue" of 1964. Here the group adopts its
trademark comic book style in a strip that intricately synco-
pates a dialogue-rich plot (collaged together from DC space
comics), captionless futuristic skylines (drawn by Herron),
and critical exegesis from comely female commentators
(avatars of contributing Archigrammers). These latter ele-
ments link the space comic back to contemporary architec-
tural discourse in "a two-way exchange between space comic
imagery and the more advanced 'real' concepts and prophe-
sies - Geodesic nets, pneumatic tubes, plastic domes, and
bubbles."4
Other issues push the magazine further into territory
unavailable to contemporary construction. Archigram 5
employs dissipative strategies that erase long held distinctions
between architecture and the city and introduces seminal
projects such as Cook's Plug- In City, Herron's Walking City,
and Dennis Crompton's Computor City. Archigram 6 further
undermines the linear sequence of traditional print media
with a clever choreography of narrative threads. For issues 7
and 8, binding is abandoned altogether and with it, the fixed
sequence of print media.
As linear narrative is left behind in the magazine, con-
current Archigram projects abandon traditional architectural
form. Cook's Metamorphosis: Sequence of Domestic Change
chronicles a dissolution of architecture from "Straight Bits"
in I960 to "Becoming Almost Ethereal" by 1985. Architecture
as static form imbued with representational meaning vanish-
es and is replaced with an ever-updated kit of gadgetry
geared to enhance human life. Other projects push this
transformative agenda even further. Webb's Suitaloon, Chalk
and Greene's Electronic Tomato, and Chalk's Bathamatic all
abandon architecture as a representational vehicle and
instead expand the possibilities of architectural performance.
Yet, as the Archigram pamphlets moved toward their
swan song, the group's unconstrained optimism began to
show signs of decay. Greene's "Popular Pak," in Archigram 8,
hints at the potential dissolution of autonomous human sub-
jects into technologically enhanced cyborgs. He writes:
The organic birth-death-life-earth-heaven-God is no longer
valid. . . . You merely: take it awaj, eat it, drive it, fuck it . . .
Plug in to any or all. Switch on and be serviced. Finished, full,
174

5. David Greene, "Popular Pak," in
Archigram 8 (1968): np.
6. Reyner Banham, "A Clip-On
Architecture," Design Quarterly 63 (1 96$):
entire issue.
switch off - doesn't matter because : 2. It's all the same . . . . The
pill and the plastic liver have ended the concern that we are all
part of some wonderful inevitable natural process, 5
For Greene, "It's all the same" has come full circle. No
longer the liberating slogan of a fully interchangeable, tech-

7. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in nological utopia, the flattening of hierarchy into unbridled
the First Machine Age (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1980).
recombinatory potential reveals its darker side. In sweeping
8. See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and away time -honored differences - between buildings and
Architecture , 5th ed. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 586.
media, between vacuum cleaners and space capsules,
9. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, between the actual and the virtual - Archigram opens the
Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year,
1968 (London: Encyclopaedia
possibility of eradicating the differences between the human
Britannica, 1968), 68; Peter Hall, and nonhuman. Like Romero's contemporaneous zombies,
"Monumental Follies," New Society
(October 1968): 602-03; Denise Scott Archigram' s bold step into a technological future suggests a
Brown, "Little Magazines in fundamental transformation of human subjectivity.
Architecture and Urbanism Journal of ********

the American Institute of Town Planning 34,

no. 4 (1968): 223-32; Alison and Peter
Through the mid-1960s
Smithson, Without Rhetoric: An
Architectural Aesthetic, 1955-1972 influential teaching, an
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 78. Many
them heroes in London
of these protests, along with Giedion's
cited above, are outlined in Charles tants to the academic st
Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture
(London: Penguin Books, 1973), 291-92.
breathless derision in n
10. The group was similarly dismissed by "A Clip-On Architectur
later historians. For example: Manfredo
Tafuri portrays them as overly idealistic
group's output and rem
in Modern Architecture (New York: the revisionist argumen
Abrams, 1976), 383; Kenneth Frampton
categorizes them among an "ambivalent" in the First Machine Ag
group that failed to adhere to his concept with a coherent genealo
of critical regionalism in Modern
Architecture: A Critical History (London: and "endless" precedent
Thames and Hudson, 1992), 280-313; and
ous if sotto voce potsho
Spiro Kostof found their efforts unfash-
ionable and out of touch with contextu- dencies of orthodox modernism.
alism and tradition in A History of
Architecture [1985] (London: Oxford
By 1967, the group's threat to the course of mainstream
University Press, 2nd ed., 1995), 748. modernism was clear, drawing a curt dismissal from no less
a figure than Sigfried Giedion.8 Further direct and indirect
condemnations from the old guard came from Constantine
Doxiadis, Peter Hall, Denise Scott Brown, the Smithsons,
and others.9 The critiques are similar in their dismissal of
the group's output as fantastical, untenable, and/or antihu-
manistic and in their adherence to earlier positions in line
with CIAM, Team X, and conventional urban planning.10
Chalk's "Owing to Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been
Cancelled" offers a rebuttal to such criticism that under-

scores Archigram's interest in experimenting in alternative

media:

It isn't necessary to be dreary to make a point, or to be profound to

have something to say; some of the greatest insights in the world
accompany a joke. And many of the mind-blowing ideas about
futures in never-never-lands have originated off the pages of
comic books and science fiction picture backs . Cartoons help us to

175

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11. Warren Chalk, "Owing to Lack of
Interest, Tomorrow Has Been
Cancelled," Architectural Design
(September 1969).
12. Peter Eisenman, "Post-
Functionalism," Oppositions 6 (1976).
Reprinted in Peter Eisenman, Eisenman
Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963-1988
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 84-87.
1?. Ibid., 86. Generally, Eisenman states
that modernism never arrived because it
"died" in 1939 with the arrival of the
International Style.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 87.
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discover the hidden realities of life, where straighter communica-
tions may fail. 11
Chalk's title captures the distinct waning of interest in
optimistic "futures in never-never-lands" that followed the
events of May 1968, as the pressing issues of an increasingly-
turbulent present came to dominate the international scene.
While the historians stepped in to summarize what was
widely perceived to be a closed chapter in architectural his-
tory, new critical journals, steeped in the theoretical lan-
guage of the Frankfurt School and the New Left, took up a
different agenda. In Italy, Contropiano launched the strident
political critiques of Antonio Negri and Manfredo Tafuri.
In France, Utopie offered a venue for the socialist positions
of Jean Baudrillard and Henri Lefebvre. But it was in the
American journal Oppositions , founded in 197? by Peter
Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, and Mario Gandelsonas, that
Continental thinking was to find its most potent architec-
tural incubator. Here, the seeds of the more theoretical
strains of architectural postmodernism were sown by a gen-
eration of revisionist thinkers who positioned themselves
unequivocally against Archigram's (and Banham's) techno-
logical progressivism.
Eisenman elucidated his position in a 1976 editorial
titled "Post-Functionalism."12 Foreclosing the possibility of
an "English Revisionist Functionalist" return to bygone
modernist tendencies, Eisenman argues that modernism in
architecture had not yet even occurred. He writes:
Deriving from a non-humanistic attitude toward the relationship
of an individual to his physical environment , it £ modernism ]
breaks with the historical past, both with the ways of viewing man
as a subject and . . . with the ethical positivism of form and func-
tion. Thus, it cannot be related to functionalism. It is probably for
this reason that modernism has not up to now been elaborated in
architecture ß
While modernism successfully had been adopted in paint-
ing, literature, and music, it had not developed in architecture
because the discipline had yet to engage the "non-objective,"
"non-narrative," and "atemporal" qualities that marked the
shift from humanism to modernism in other fields and sig-
naled the movement's fundamental condition: "a displace-
ment of man away from the center of his world."14 To finally
bring about architectural modernism, Eisenman argued for
the abandonment of the form/ function dialectic (and its
outmoded humanism) in favor of a "new, modern dialectic"
of "transformation" and "decomposition" located "within
the evolution of form itself."15
176
 Again we see the central concern turning around the
nature of subjectivity. Doxiadis and other orthodox critics
saw Archigranťs experiments with technology as "inhuman"
16. This commitment extended to the threats to modernist achievement, but their condemnations
political and social structures that kept
that subject intact. As they put it in
missed the mark. While Archigranťs technological progres-
Archigram 3, "We shall not bulldoze sivism appeared threatening (as noted earlier, even Greene
Westminster Abbey." Indeed, Plug- In
City and other expendable "componen- saw the risks), the group for the most part maintained a
try" hardly could have been considered commitment to the subject's stability equal to that of their
without assuming a robust industrial
economy backed by a strong capitalist critics.16 For Banham, their technologically enhanced envi-
state. This tacit commitment to the status
ronments provided the perfect playground for homo ludens , the
quo would prove a liability to the group's
standing in the post- '68 vanguard, as we idealized "man at play" first theorized by Johan Huizinga.17
shall see below.
17. Banham outlines this version of the The technology question, then, is a red herring. As Eisenman
modern subject and its relation to pointed out, the central question was rather the displace-
Archigram in Megastructure: Urban
Futures of the Recent Past (New York:
ment of the subject. In his view, the ambition of both camps
Harper and Row, 1976), 84-103. to place the human subject at "the center of his world"
18. A raft of publications has been devot-
ed to the subject of '60s cultural theory. advanced not a modernist position but rather a nostalgic
Two excellent surveys, written from maintenance of traditional humanism. Alongside the van-
opposing points of view, are Luc Ferry
and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the guard of the post-'68 generation, he saw no place in the con-
Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism [1986],
temporary context for adherence to such an outmoded view
trans. Mary Schackenberg Cattani
(Amherst: The University of of subjectivity.
Massachusetts Press, 1990), and François
Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, this battle for
Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault ,
Derrida, Deleuze, Co. Transformed the the subject raged across the cultural landscape.18 And whether
Intellectual Life of the United States [2003],
it was waged in the streets of Paris, the pages of Oppositions,
trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008). or in the gory scenes of Night of the Living Dead , it was con-
19. See http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/
library/documents/archigram.pdf
ventional humanism that generally came out the loser. For
(accessed August 8, 2008). A few notable Archigram, this meant a distinct falling out of favor with
texts did appear in this apparent morato-
rium, including Ron Herron: Twenty Years progressive architectural culture. By the mid-^Os, their last
of Drawings (London: Architectural pamphlet had been printed, their largest commission had
Association, 1980) and a seeming obitu-
ary of the group by Peter Cook, "In been cancelled, their offices closed, their ranks dispersed,
Memoriam: Archigram," Daidalos 4 and their consistent presence in the architectural press faded
(1982).
20. The show, curated by Dennis to obscurity. The dearth of Archigram literature that ensued
Crompton, opened in Vienna in February after 1975 is best reflected in an extensive bibliography on the
1994 and by 2005 had traveled to Paris,
Zurich, Hamburg, Manchester, New group compiled by the library of the Architectural Association
York, Ithaca, Pasadena, San Francisco,
Seattle, Milan, Brussels, Rotterdam,
in London, which contains no entries for the period of 1976
Winnipeg, Chicago, Taipei, and Tokyo. through 1986, and only a handful through 1994-.19
Four catalogues have been released: Alain
Guiheux, ed., Archigram (Paris: Editions
That year saw the opening of a major traveling exhibi-
du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994); tion, "Archigram: Experimental Architecture, 1961-1974,"
Dennis Crompton, ed., A Guide to
Archigram: 1961-74 (London: Academy and an explosion of interest in the group has continued
Editions, 1994); Crompton, ed., unabated into the present.20 The causes of this renewed
Concerning Archigram (London:
Archigram Archives, 1998); and interest are varied and perhaps impossible to pin down
Crompton, ed., Archigram: Experimental
specifically, though certain trends helped to create a recep-
Architecture, 1961-1974 (Tokyo: PIE
Books, 2005). tive audience. Barry Curtis cites the success of British High
21. Barry Curtis, "A Necessary Irritant,"
Tech as a catalyst, while William Menking deploys Archigram
and William Menking, "Archigram:
Welcome to New York," both in as an alternative to the nostalgic "mailing of 42nd Street"
Crompton (2005), 25-79 and 160-67.
and other saccharine postmodernist confections.21 In the
mid-1990s, architectural postmodernism began to show signs
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"Space Probe." Article assembled
by Warren Chalk for Archigram

4 (1964). Image © Archigram

Archives.

of strain, as architects and critics began to evoke, after years

22. Jeffrey Kipnis provides an important
polemic in "Towards a New
Architecture," in Folding in Architecture ,
ed. Greg Lynn (London: Academy
Editions, 1 99Ï).
11. Kipnis discusses the nature of the
Koolhaas/Eisenman relationship in the
early '90s in "Recent Koolhaas," El
Croquis 79 (1 996): 26.
24. In their bold graphics and terse prose,
Koolhaas' s numerous publications (and
the cottage industry of copycat mega-
tomes they inspired) owe much to
Archigram pamphlets.
of measured avoidance, the term new.12 This new architecture
was marked by a steady shift away from the overtly theoreti-
cal '80s into a more technologically inspired '90s, as well as
the slow disintegration of the "uneasy alliance" between
Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas.2*
Even during his association with Eisenman's Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1970s, Koolhaas
never subscribed to the suppression of Archigram so central
to Eisenman's anti-neofunctionalist position. His 1972
Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture was a
dystopian Archigram redux, their genial technophilia here
gone feral, their playful sexuality now hardcore. Like his
British forebears, Koolhaas first made his name through
publication.24 Breakthrough OMA projects of the early '90s
- the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Jussieu Library (Paris), and
the Médiathèque in Karlsruhe - maintained similar affilia-
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 tions to Archigranťs brash juxtaposition of formal and pro-
grammatic elements toward subversively social rather than
overtly configurational ends.
If in the '90s one branch of the discipline turned its
attention toward the manic accumulations of program and
publication characterized by Koolhaas's work, another
embraced a technophilia not seen since Archigranťs celebra-
tion of 1960s space-age componentry. The advent of digital
design technologies saw architectural studios of all stripes
leapfrog from T-squared Ludditism to the forefront of
Information Age experimentation. In more advanced prac-
tices, this move ushered in a wave of digital projects that,
like Archigranťs, proved too ambitious to fabricate but too
influential to dismiss (both despite valiant efforts by dedicated
proponents and detractors). Whether aligned with the pro-
grammatic aims of the Koolhaas camp or the technologically
enhanced inheritors of autonomous form, both arms of the
late-20th-century architectural vanguard could claim
Archigram as their rightful forebear.
As works by members of the digital set garner ever
increasing attention within the discipline, we see many of
the old arguments again coming to the fore. In an eerie echo
of Archigranťs reception, today's vanguard is celebrated for
leaving the shackles of built form behind as often as it is
chastised for advancing monstrous aberrations of architec-
ture. In either case, building- generai ed effects take center
stage, with those produced in other media garnering either
extended justification or out-of-hand dismissal. The organi-
zation of so many debates across the built/unbuilt divide,
today as in the '60s, leaves the specific tactics, strategies, and
relations to material practices beyond the building industry
yet proper to architecture under-examined and ripe for fur-
ther study. Directing our attention here can elucidate archi-
tecture's long-standing attentiveness toward and expertise
with the complex dynamics that issue from the accumulation,
dispersal, and interpénétration of media.
********

25. This tactic echoes Banham's famous

With remarkable consist
closing to Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age and is employed (sometimes to conclude by discussin
with a direct quotation) in Curtis' s tecture in the face of ad
"Archigram: A Necessary Irritant," in
Hadas Steiner's Bathrooms, Bubbles, and marks the ultimate failu
Sjstems: Archigram and the Landscape of
attainable mandate to b
Transience (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, guard remains an open
2001), and Simon Sadler's Archigram:
Architecture without Architecture conversations slide into
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), and else- of the avant-garde. Wh
where.
purist disavowal for th
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 the inheritors of their tradition, critics on the left readily
attack the few built examples that have emerged (Centre
Pompidou, the Seattle Library, Kunsthaus Graz) as complic-
it monuments to architectural tradition in spite of their sup
posed revolutionary ambitions. Such bickering offers little
contemporary discourse.
Architects have long suffered from a self-perpetuated,
chauvinistic stance toward materials. Despite periodic
attempts to correct this backward view, we tend to hold
bricks and mortar, and to a lesser extent glass and steel, in
exalted positions. This view artificially foregrounds perma-
nent buildings as the sole area of our expertise even as thei
execution falls increasingly outside our control. Further
compounding these anxieties is the widely held agreement
with Walter Benjamin that buildings are best experienced in
a state of distracted attention - even if we manage to pull on
together, properly critical culture is encouraged not to notic
Yet regardless of whether they ultimately are built, all
architectural projects are actualized first as drawings, writ-
ings, models, gestures, and speeches long before their insta
tiation in built form. And it is here, in the materially specifi
realm of paper and pixels, that architects ply some of their
most potent effects. Indeed, architecture is present in print
surely as it is in the enduring stones of the Acropolis, thoug
it is perhaps only now, after a century of engagement with
contemporary media, that we are able to notice it there.
Understanding architecture not as a class of buildings but
as an emergent effect that issues from a range of media
reveals the Archigrams and their monstrous progeny not as
a dangerous threat to disciplinarity or a disappointing
reminder of our inefficacy, but as the clearest indicator of
the discipline's unparalleled expertise in the contemporary
mediated milieu. Though they may call for reconsiderations
of the nature of modernism, the essence of architecture, or
even the constitution of human subjectivity, these mutant
experiments do not signal the dissolution of architecture.
Rather, architecture's undead demonstrate that the disci-
pline's most enduring strengths obtain where we least expe
to find them - in the array of less durable but equally poten
materials beyond building.

Todd Gannon is a Los Angeles-

BASED ARCHITECT, TEACHER, AND

WRITER. He IS CURRENTLY PREPAR-
ING A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION ON

the Archigrams AT UCLA.

180

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