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RIBA Annual Discourse 1996 Architecture

after history: nostalgia and modernity at
the end of the century
Anthony Vidler
Published online: 18 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Anthony Vidler (1996) RIBA Annual Discourse 1996 Architecture after history:
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RIBA Annual Discourse 1996
Architecture after history: nostalgia and modernity
at the end of the century
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Anthony Vidler
Thank you for your invitation to speak this evening
in the yearly series of RIBA discourses. If I were an
architect – I understand that this series was insti-
tuted by Alvar Aalto in 1950 – I would no doubt
Žnd it easier to rise to such an occasion with a
few introductory remarks to the presentation of
projects and buildings. As a historian and critic,
however, the task is made more difŽcult by the
inevitable impulse to use the lecture as a moment
to reect on the general ‘state of architecture’, on
the differing issues and positions, not to mention
styles and design approaches, dividing the pro-
fession and its critics – themes such as ‘architec-
ture and the crisis of meaning,’ ‘modernism,
postmodernism, and beyond,’ ‘architecture after
deconstruction,’ and the like. In lieu of these
grandiose and over-arching subjects, I thought that
it might be more interesting to address topics of
immediate interest, arising from recent architec-
tural events in London. To take two examples: the
construction and demolition of Rachel Whiteread’s
‘House’ between October 1993 and January 1994
(Figs 1 and 2); and, more recently, Daniel
Libeskind’s winning entry for an extension to the
Victoria and Albert Museum (Figs 3 and 4), in
May of this year.
As it happens these two examples are entirely
germane to the larger implications of my title this
evening: ‘Architecture after history: nostalgia and
modernity at the end of the century’. For both
projects, in different ways, point to the emergence
© 1996 E & FN Spon
177
The Journal
of Architecture
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College of Architecture, Art and Planning,
Cornell University, New York, USA
of what I see as a new paradigm in architec-
tural thought and form, one that for better or
for worse has been in preparation for some time
under cover of already seasoned movements
and styles, from modernism, postmodernism to
deconstructivism, but that Žnally escapes these
to propose ‘something else’ as a paradigm for
architecture. Something that, going by the critical
debates over Whiteread’s ‘House’ and those
already swirling around Libeskind’s project, has
not as yet developed any agreed-upon terms for
its judgement, pro or con, of the kind that has
enabled us to distinguish between and debate
the merits of, say, postmodern classicism and
high-tech late modernism. Which is to say, that
despite a century of acculturation for modernist
and postmodernist architecture, these two projects
seem unable to ‘Žt’ into any deŽnable popular
or high-critical frame. Whiteread’s house has
been portrayed in cartoons, and in the critical
press, with varying degrees of allegory and irony,
even its supporters resorting to punning head-
lines – on the order of ‘the house that Rachel built’,
‘home work,’ ‘house calls,’ ‘a concrete idea,’ ‘the
house that Rachel unbuilt,’ ‘home truths,’ ‘no
house room to art’ – and the punning burial of
the Libeskind addition is already well under way –
‘may the V&A boxes tumble and prosper,’
‘exploding extension.’
I will be arguing this evening that each of
these projects, in differing ways, represents a
1360–2365
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1996
Anthony Vidler
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Figure 1. ‘House’ by
Rachel Whiteread,
October 1993–January
1994, rear view.
(Photograph by Sue
Omerod, courtesy of
Artangel.)
turning away from, or critical position towards,
the major thrust of architectural thinking over
the last century or so, and perhaps even sig-
nals the introduction of a changed paradigm for
the composition of architecture, a paradigm that
does not necessarily portend a radical change in
direction so much as it reects a deep nostalgia
for modernism, if not the entire project of moder-
nity. I want to be clear here: I am not proposing
that these projects are intrinsically the best or the
most radical of present attempts to Žgure archi-
tecture; rather I am using them to characteriz e
what I see as a growing tendency in architectural
thought, in the face of a new Žn de siècle that
for some time has been hinting at the disappear-
ance of the architectural object into some form of
cybernetic void.
Let me explain what I mean by this by referring
to the historically dominant paradigm for archi-
tecture over the modern period as a whole. In
this analysis, I am going to avoid the commonly
held terms that supposedly describe stylistic
changes, and that have been adopted to catego-
rize architectural production in the easy manner
of traditional art history – ‘historicist’, ‘modernist’,
‘postmodernist’, ‘deconstructivist’ – and instead
I am going to speak of paradigms, or frames of
reference that seem to cut through and underlie
these other, surface, descriptions. In the process, I
am also going to be making some broad general-
izations, that will inevitably have their exceptions
in every historical moment.
We might all agree that at some time quite
early in the nineteenth century, perhaps even
at the end of the eighteenth, architectural think-
ers and writers joined their counterparts in other
disciplines – philosophy, literature, painting, etc. –
in a common interest in, if not obsession with,
time and temporality. As we know, this took the
form of an increasing awareness of history, of
the historical styles, and a general sense that his-
torical narrative formed the basis for architectural
production. And this basis in narrative, generally
a narrative of progress, seemed to offer a reas-
suring authority – the precedent and law of his-
torical development – one that gained even more
signiŽcance when joined to the emerging science
of evolution. A work might thus be constituted
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Figure 2. ‘House’ by
Rachel Whiteread,
October 1993–January
1994, side view.
(Photograph by Sue
Omerod, courtesy of
Artangel.)

as representative of another era, bringing that
era’s principles, morals, ethics, social and cultural
values, into play in the present; or, alterna-
tively, on the historicist principle that each epoch
in the past seemed to have its own manner
of speaking, its own language, authentic to
its society and no other, an architectural work
might call for a language appropriate to mod-
ern times, one that future historians could single
out as being distinctively modern. In any case
the architectural work was deeply founded on
and in history, with a sense of its place, how-
ever precarious, with respect to past, present and
future.
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1996
Anthony Vidler
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Figure 3. The attempted, in general terms, to relieve the present

Boilerhouse Project
of the burden of the past. We might take
Conceptual board, October
1996. Architect: Daniel
Nietzsche’s attack on the burden of the historical
Libeskind. past in his essay ‘Of the advantage and disadvan-
tage of history for every day life’ as paradigmatic
Figure 4. Conceptual of this movement, that attempted to counter the
model by Daniel Libeskind,
overpowering force of ‘History’ by a modernity that
winner in the competition
to select an architect for
seemed to want to stand outside of time, some-
the Boilerhouse at the thing that was loosely understood as space. The
V&A, Spring 1996. emergence of this new paradigm for architec-
ture was characterized in the call by the various
modernist avant-gardes for an escape from history,
and an afŽrmation of the importance of space both
for architectural planning and form, and for
modern life as a whole.
Such a paradigm, elaborated at its most extreme
by Le Corbusier in his concept of l’espace indicible
did not, of course, spring fully-edged and
complete overnight from the corpus of historicism,
however; the relationship of the new spatial para-
digms of history, and their emergence from and
within historical discourse was tortuous, and
perhaps never absolute. The passage from time to
space has never been better represented than in
its difŽcult period of working out, and nowhere
more eloquently than in Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time, a novel that despite the misleading overtones
of Edwardian nostalgia in its English translation as
Remembrance of Things Past was never really
We might also agree, that at some time towards concerned as much with memory as it was with
the end of the nineteenth century, gaining ground the spatialization of time. Julia Krsiteva in a recent
in the Žrst years of this century, this sense of histor- study puts it this way:
ical authority was challenged, Žrst in philosophy
and psychology, then in the arts in general, ‘When faced with two inexorable forms of tem-
and subjected to a critique of temporality that porality – death . . . and change . . . – and with

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the illusory rebirth of youth, the novel goes beyond
the vagaries of linear time and recovers a sort of
temporal anteriority. Hence, by avoiding time’s two
implacable imperatives – death and change, which
are also imperatives of desire, be it the desire to
love or the desire to dominate – what we might
call a ‘timeless time’ locates a series of sensations
on the margins of time, that is, in space. The recol-
lection-sensation does away with time and replaces
it with an eternity – the spatial eternity of a literary
work that Proust compares to a cathedral.’1
‘Space’ rapidly replaced time, and speciŽcally time
as represented by historical ‘style’ as related to
‘nationality,’ ‘society’ and ‘culture.’ ‘Space –
protagonist of architecture, ’ noted Bruno Zevi in
1948, summing up over Žfty years of spatial theory
and practice that marked out architecture from the
other arts as a functional and experiential accom-
modation of the moving body and the perceiving
subject. Embraced by art historians and architects
alike, the idea of space held the double promise
of dissolving rigid stylistic characterization into
fundamental three-dimensional organizations and
of providing the essential material, so to speak, for
the development of a truly modern architecture.
Generally recognized by pioneers of formal
analysis like Heinrich Wölfin, and Alois Riegl,
‘space’ became central to the architectural histo-
ries of August Schmarsow and Paul Frankl, and
was canonized, so to speak, within the modernist
tradition by the publication of Sigfried Giedion’s
Space, Time and Architecture in 1941. For Giedion,
as for most modernist architects, the invention of
a ‘new’ space conception was the leitmotiv of
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modernity itself, and this theme was taken up after
World War II by, among many others, historians
like Bruno Zevi, Rex Martienssen, and Renato de
Fusco.
But paradoxically enough, perhaps the most
powerful support for a new concept of space was
engendered by the transformation of the idea of
temporality in modern thought. Long before the
popularization of Einstein, the calibration of space
to time preoccupied philosophers and aestheticians ,
writers, painters and architects to the extent that
‘space–time’ became a dominant leitmotiv of
modernism. The visual experiments of Marey and
Muybridge, followed by their instrumentalization
in the service of time and motion studies and
Taylorization, provided images of movement in
space that were ratiŽed and exploited not just
in moving pictures, but in the overlapping and mul-
tiple exposures of Futurism and Cubism. In archi-
tecture, the moving subject in space was given
the role of form-giver, accommodated mechanically
and phenomenally, through all the techniques and
representational devices of speed and transparency.
And, as the subject was not only moving in its phys-
ical dimensions, the new space was called on to
reect its shifting moods and psychological states.
The resulting call for a spatial representation of such
double movement, physical and psychical, found
diverse responses in modernism, from Expressionist
distortion, Purist ‘promenades’ in ‘inŽnite space,’ to
the psychological ânerie of Surrealism .
For these reasons, spatial ideas were particularly
attractive to modernist architects; Žrst as a way of
escaping the historicist trap of stylistic revivalis m
and incorporating time, movement, and social life
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into the conceptualization of abstract form in
general, then as a way of deŽning the terms of
this new life, its relationship to nature and the
body. The history of modernism, indeed, might be
and has often been written as a history of
competing ideas of space. At the turn of the
century, Hendrick Berlage wrote on Raumkunst und
Architektur in 1907; August Endell, who had
followed the lectures of Theodor Lipps in Munich,
joined spatial theory to empathy theory in his Die
Schönheit des grossen Stadt of 1908; both authors
have been seen as inuential on the spatial ideas
of Mies van der Rohe.2 The Dutch architects and
painters in the de Stijl group, including Theo van
Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, advanced their revo-
lutionary concepts of ‘neo-plastic’ space in their
own journal. In the United States, Frank Lloyd
Wright took on the entire space of the continent
in his vision of a ‘prairie’ space, Žt for demo-
cratic individualists. His Viennese assistant, Rudolf
Schindler, dubbed this ‘space architecture’ in a brief
homage to what he called this ‘new medium’
published in 1934. In France, the reections of
Henri Bergson on time, movement, and space,
were quickly picked up by architects and artists,
and incorporated into the popular writings of Elie
Faure. These were taken up by the painter
Ozenfant and the architect Le Corbusier, later to
be elaborated into the latter’s poetic evocation of
a modernist espace indicible or ‘ineffable space’.
It was hardly coincidental, then, that historians of
the Modern Movement, armed with the same
spatial concepts in their own discipline, were able
to Žnd a neat correspondence between ‘space’ and
the ‘modernity’ of the century.
Historians like Sigfried Giedion celebrated just
these qualities as proto-modernist exhibitions of the
will to overcome all structural and spatial limitations
in the service of a new architecture. Here, as is well
known, Giedion formulated a modernism that
was heir to the Baroque, that was both triumphant
and prospective. For him, the Baroque, and its com-
plex questioning of Renaissance perspective stabil-
ity and realist representation, its combination of
perspectival multiplicity and illusion, found in its
most developed form in the work of Borromini
and Guarini, seemed, in retrospect, to preŽgure
cubism. When joined to the spatial interpenetratio n
exhibited in the engineering structures of the late
nineteenth century, the potential of the Baroque
was turned into constructive possibility: ‘this possi-
bility was latent in the skeleton system of con-
struction, but the skeleton had to be used as
Le Corbusier uses it,’ concluded Giedion, ‘in the
service of a new conception of space.’3 In this
model of spatial history, the role played by structure
became pivotal; Giedion’s pairing of Borromini’s
lantern of Sant’Ivo and Tatlin’s project for a
Monument to the Third International has itself
become a commonplace, as has his analysis of
Guarini’s cupola of San Lorenzo, where ‘the impres-
sion of unlimited space has been achieved not
through the employment of perspective illusions
or of a painted sky but through exclusively archi-
tectural means’ that go ‘to the very end of con-
structional resources.’ It remained only for modern
construction methods to overcome these limits, and
for modern architects to imagine modern space,
and the equation spatial imagination + structural
invention = progress would be conŽrmed.

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And yet, this positive vision of spatial redemp-
tion, had, from the beginning, as we noted with
regard to Proust, had its uncertain side; early on
there emerged voices that were far from certain
that space had the redemptive power claimed by
its adherents. As Heidegger wrote in the essay Art
and Space:
‘Space – does it belong among those original
things (urphänomenen) which, when perceived
from nearby, as Goethe observed, seize one with
a kind of fear approaching anxiety?’
Indeed, from the outset, the very notion of
‘modern space’, as outlined by historians like
Wölfin, was framed in such uncertainty. I have
written elsewhere of the implications for
modernism that modern space was Žrst conceived
as an extension of Baroque space – one remem-
bers Wölfin’s celebrated comparison of 1888,
‘One can hardly fail to recognize the afŽnity that
our own age in particular bears to the Italian
Baroque’ – and his corresponding association of
modern space with decline and dissolution, lack
of boundaries, and the like. Or, later, we think of
Le Corbusier’s dream of ‘bathing in ineffable space’
a dream suited to the ubermensch of his aerobic
imagination that was, from the outset, countered
by the troubling realization that space as such was
posited on the basis of an aesthetics of uncertainty
and movement and a psychology of anxiety,
whether nostalgically melancholic or progressively
anticipatory. With its roots in the empirical
psychology and neo-Kantian formalism of the late
nineteenth century – Robert Vischer’s theories of
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optical perception, Theodor Lipp’s concepts of
empathy and raumästhetik, and Conrad Fiedler’s
mentalism – the psychology of space was one that
was devoted to calibrating the endlessly shifting
sensations and moods of a perceiving subject
whose perceptions moreover had less to do with
what was objectively ‘there’ than what was
projected as seen.4 The social-psychology of space,
as elaborated by Georg Simmel, was established
on equally insecure grounds. Space itself, Simmel
argued, was the result, rather than the container,
of social relations. In these terms we might char-
acterize the space of modernism as ‘psychological
space.’
Here, I want to introduce my third paradigm,
one that seems to be gaining ground slowly, and
with all the inherited problems of its former attach-
ment to spatial concepts, but that in its funda-
mental form, I believe has nothing to do with space
at all, or rather not with space conceived in
modernist terms. This would be the condition of
‘no-space’ or that horrifying condition referred to
by Pascal as a ‘vacuum,’ as it has remerged in the
contemporary discourse of cybernetics. While this
paradigm has been until now for obvious reasons
couched in spatial terms – one hears of virtual
space or cyberspace – I would contend that these
terms are generated in order to think the hitherto
unthinkable – or rather the unthinkable within the
frame of modernism – conditions of life without
space, of the spaceless, or of the absolute ‘void.’
Even to describe them this way is to engage analo-
gies with our own conventions, that force us to
understand the spaceless in spatial terms.
‘Cyberspace’ may well, I think, be a hybrid coined
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out of nostalgia, an attempt to ward off the difŽ-
cult notion of the spatially absent. I would hazard
that even as the notion of space–time seemed to
have been constructed at the very moment when
time itself was an endangered species, a way of
thinking through the new spatial conditions by way
of the old – ‘lost time’ – so now cyber-worlds are
being construed in spatial terms at the moment
when space as we know it is no longer a powerful
frame for thought.
After all, what is spatial after all about an endless
string of 0’s and 1’s, a string that for the purposes
of display has to be looped around a screen; an
endless line, without direction, displayed on a
screen without depth? While the representation of
information might well have spatial cognates,
information itself seems to have no inherent
spatiality. Nor can we return to the comforting
terms of a temporal discourse, the authorities
of narrative, of beginnings, middles, and ends, of
pasts, presents, and futures, that so controlled our
thinking in the nineteenth century, and that have
reappeared consistently in the nostalgic counter-
spatial moves of the twentieth. For narrative itself,
temporality itself, has been collapsed, like space,
into no-time and no-space. Which might be why
speculative thought about this condition, since
the 1980s, and especially in the genre of novel
pioneered by William Gibson (and that today seems
itself so comforting and almost archaic in its formu-
lations) now known as cyber-punk, why specula-
tive thought about the cyber-world, has been
couched almost entirely in dystopian terms – not
only no-space and no-time, but bad-no-space and
bad-no-time. (I must say that I count the apparent
optimism of Newt Gingrich, Nicolas Negroponte
and President Clinton regarding the future ‘inform-
ation highway’ among the more horrifying exam-
ples of this genre.)
In this moment of paradigm ambiguity, there is
no doubt that, even as we experienced a severe
nostalgia for time and history at the beginning
of the modern period, resurrected from time to
time throughout the century in order to combat
spatial modernism, we are now in the throes of
an equally strong nostalgia for space, in both
theory and practice.
The political and social characteristics of space,
theorized in political geography and sociology
since Theodor Herzl, Georg Simmel, and Maurice
Halbwachs, increasingly seen as keys to the under-
standing of architecture and urbanism, and that
informed studies as diverse as Chombart de Lauwe
on Paris and the Situationists’ critiques of urbanism
in Internationale situationniste (1958–1969), have
recently been nostalgically reconsidered. Psycho-
logical and existential theories of space based on
the theories of Eugène Minkowski, Jean Piaget,
and of course, Heidegger and Sartre, that were
so inuential on the interpretation of architecture’s
‘poetics’ (Gaston Bachelard’s La poétique de
l’espace was Žrst published in 1957), have re-
emerged as supports to new theories of ambiguous
identities, sexual and social. Architectural ‘func-
tionalists’ who were comforted by the empirical
experiments of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden
Dimension) and Robert Sommer (Personal Space:
The Behavioral Basis of Design) at the same time
by the urban semiotics of Kevin Lynch, have been
sustained by the manuals of spatial organization

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developed by Christopher Alexander. Since the late
1960s, Marxist (Henri Lefebvre) and poststruc-
turalist (Michel Foucault) analysis reinvigorated the
idea of space by relating it to power and institu-
tionalized systems of order: prisons, asylums,
schools, as well as the ideology of functionalism,
became the privileged objects of study for histo-
rians concerned to locate and resist the sources of
power within the professional discourse of archi-
tecture itself. Postmodernism has, similarly, been
characterized as a reaction to modernism –
whether in its spatial complexities, or its return to
traditional values. Critics like Frederic Jameson, in
his seminal essay on the Hotel Bonaventure in Los
Angeles, have even postulated a generalized ‘post-
modern space’. Supporters of minority discourses
based on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, have
explored the potentiality of spatial analysis for the
assertion of speciŽc values and sites that might
conŽrm and sustain subjects and societies more
differentiated in nature and construction than the
imaginary ‘universal subject’ of modernism and
traditional Marxism. Sociologists and urban geog-
raphers have rewritten Marxism to include the
spatial and the territorial in their considerations of
class and ethnic struggle; gender theorists have
interrogated the ‘space of sexuality’, attempting to
identify what might be the dimensions of feminist,
gay, lesbian, or ‘queer’ space; post-colonial thinkers
have stressed the ‘liminal’ conditions of exilic
subjects in space.
In its unsettling ability to join the inŽnite to the
tangible, the sublime to the real, modern space
has retained the double dimensions of utopia and
melancholy present in its initial theorization.
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The Journal
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Indeed, both these dimensions have been fully
exploited by contemporary identity theorists; in, for
example, the double condition of ‘liminality’ and
the ‘uncanny’ experienced by the post-colonial
subject characterized by Homi Bhabha, or the
space of afŽrmation and mourning afŽrmed by
theorists of ‘queer space’, or again the elusive
space of lesbian and bisexual theory, as outlined
by, among others, Judy Butler and Liz Grosz. Finally,
the capacities of the spatial metaphor both to
conŽrm and undermine the places and sites of
gender difference have been most signiŽcantly
mustered on behalf of gender theory by the femi-
nist philosopher (Luce Lirigaray) in her radical re-
reading of the Heideggerian ‘space of being.’
In this way, the theorization of modern space
has been brought back to its starting point, so to
speak, but with an entirely new instrumentality and
on behalf of a new politics of identity and gender.
First formulated as a way of understanding the
pathological states of bodies and minds when
confronted by objects, at the end of a century of
interpretative experience, psychoanalytical, polit-
ical, and philosophical, the concept of space seems
to maintain its critical force as a measure of the
place of differentiated subjects and their desires in
the world, even as it provides a link between the
abstract contemplation of architectural objects and
the act of their construction. In this role, it would
seem to be entirely appropriate that the practice
of spatial analysis continues to be construed as the
study of spatial anxiety.
And yet, despite the obviously positive virtues
of such re-readings of spatial theory, the sense of
nostalgia – for politics, for the subject, for national
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1996
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identity, for gender itself – that pervades them
persuades us that the spatial world is already lost
to us. Where Foucault was able to proclaim the
supercession of humanism by a post-humanist
science of man that Žnally lost the human subject
as an object of study, now science and informa-
tion have constructed a world that has little need
of humans in the Žrst place.
In this context, and to return to my initial exam-
ples, we can now see that the vituperative attacks
on Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ might have been
stimulated, not only by the politics and aesthetics
of ‘resistance’ to avant-garde art, but by her shock-
ingly simple gesture of ‘shutting space out’, or
rather, shutting us out of space. There is not only
no room for us in the ‘House’, there is no space
left either. Space is both denied and destroyed;
Žlled, where a modernist or postmodernist sensi-
bility would demand that it be opened.
And it is precisely in terms of this ‘space-Žlling’
move that we might, Žnally, read the new project
for the V&A ‘Boilerhouse’ addition (and how
comforting it is to feel that we are in the process
of replacing a boilerhouse, Žrst machine age struc-
ture with a second machine age structure that,
however avant-garde its guise, is still recognizably
avant-garde in form). For Libeskind’s project,
despite its radical justiŽcations, and suitably
horriŽed reactions (themselves almost comforting),
takes its place in a long line of counter-spatial
projects, all conceived within the spatial paradigm
to cut against the normalizing tendencies of
modernist, universal, hygienic space. From the
beginning of space in architectural theory, counter-
space, or rather counter-rational space, has been
a necessary antimony for the support of the
entire discourse. Thus, Wölfin’s terrifying Baroque
versus Giedion’s progressive Baroque; the surreal-
ists ‘intra-uterine’ space against Corbusian trans-
parent space; tent and tensile space against
gridded space; moving space against static space;
psychogeographic space as against sociological,
planning, and urbanist space; nomadological
versus state space as Deleuze and Guattari would
have it; rhyzomic space versus network space;
Bataille’s informe versus modernist form. This last
concept – one that intriguingly has been revived
in critical thought in the last decade, culminating
in Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain Bois’s current
exhibition at the Centre Pompidou – is one that I
would cite as informing the Libeskind project under
consideration. For Libeskind’s V&A is, I have noted
earlier, a space-eating project; it sets out to image
the consumption of space by a substance that is
not quite solid, not quite liquid. It might be linked
to the recent interest in ‘blobs’ – substances that
have no Žxed form, but that devour as they Žll,
and spill over uncontrollably into realms previously
sheltered and defended from their power. Alien
substances, of course, but ones that have been
around in movie form for a long time.
Thus ‘space devouring’, far from the radical
assertion of a new form of spatiality, emerges as
one version of traditional interstitiality, the in-
between, Žrst theorized by gestalt theorists and
made into a leitmotiv of collage city planning by
Colin Rowe and his followers. Such a nostalgic
appeal to the spatial might almost seem
comforting in itself, if, however, something else
was not lurking behind this and other similar

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schemes (I mention those of Frank Gehry and Peter
Eisenman, but one might also see the new South
Bank project by Richard Rogers in the same
light). These are schemes, that in their desperate
nostalgia for modernist space, positive or negative,
are in a way all-consuming artefacts, that as they
contain intimations of the new cyber-world Žgured
in spatial terms, nevertheless almost literally devour
the old spatial world as they go. They thus Žgure
literally, what many modernists have known for a
long time, that space, as well as time, is destruc-
tive of the object; that space in the abstract is all
pervasive; that transparency is at the same time
monumental oblivion. And without objects, where
are our beloved subjects? The new Bibliothèque de
France as I have noted elsewhere, is a perfect para-
digm of the ultimate effects of the transparency
drive.
Perhaps none of this matters, and perhaps we
will not mind too much as we are left clicking
187
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 1
Autumn 1996
endlessly at our screens, believing that hacking is
control, in a spaceless world, imaged brilliantly in
the now celebrated opening lines of Gibson’s
Neuromancer, a world the ‘color of televisio n
tuned to a dead channel’. But one might point out
to the present-day prophets of the future, judging
by the history of the future since Futurism, and to
use the formulation of Louis Althusser’s recent
autobiography of the same title, that The Future
Lasts a Long Time. During this time, and through
this space, we will, in the next decade or so, have
to Žgure the terms in which no-time and no-space
might be Žgured, and what then becomes of archi-
tecture?
Notes and references
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Prentice
Hall, 1969).
Robert Sommer, Personal space: The Behavioral
Basis of Design (Prentice Hall, 1969).