John Macarthur

The picturesque : architecture, disgust and other irregularities

In this fresh and authoritative account John Macarthur presents the eighteenth century idea of the picturesque – when it was a risky term concerned with a refined taste for everyday things, such as the hovels of the labouring poor – in the light of its reception and effects in modern culture. in a series of linked essays Macarthur shows:

The Nomenclature of Style: Brutalism, Minimalism, Art History and Visual Style in Architecture Journals

Naming styles or movements is a basic mechanism of architectural journals. The announcement of phenomena such as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘deconstructivism’ involves referring architectural developments to a context in socio-politics or philosophy, and thus provides at least an initial resistance to their understanding as formal styles, which they quickly become. A different strategy is the naming of an architectural moment in the traditional form of an art historical style. Peter Reyner Banham and the Architecture Reviews promotion of ‘Brutalism’ as an anti-aesthetic, look its conceptual form from explicit movements, with members and agenda, such as Futurism. Architectural Designs promotion of ‘Minimalism’ in the l990s exemplifies a different kind of style. In both cases, apparently divergent uses of ‘style’ are complicated by the process of naming, and by the tendency of the journals graphic design to become the style—to become self-identifying.

The look of the object: Minimalism in art and architecture, then and now

In Modernism the category of the art-object was one of the points at which architecture and the visual arts are differentiated and articulated. The rise of so called ‘minimalist’ architecture with its fixation on object qualities, and its borrowing from art theory suggests that this difference is collapsing. By looking at works from the late nineteen sixties by Manfredo Tafuri. Michael Fried and Theodor Adomo. this essay opens some of the complexities the theory of the object in the end game of high modernism, and speculates on significance of the new taste for the look of the object.

Oxford versus the Bath Road: Empiricism and romanticism in The Architectural Review's picturesque revival

The picturesque is having one of its periodic surges of popularity. This is largely hidden under terms such as ‘landscape urbanism’, which puts architectural ideas back into the context of the mess...

Schwitters and Benjamin: the modernity of the baroque and romanticism

This paper is an attempt to read Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau through Walter Benjamin’s theory of the baroque in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama (or Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, hereafter simply Ursprung). It then considers whether Benjamin’s idea of a relationship between the baroque and Early German Romantic art theory has any bearing on the charge of Schwitters’ contemporaries that he was merely a ‘German Romantic’ in Dada costume. In the first place, this is an exercise in matching formal attributes to concepts, and must be assessed on whether the comparisons are apposite: whether Benjamin’s distinctions allow us to see more in Schwitters; whether the works of Schwitters provide the kind of illustration to the Trauerspiel that Paul Klee’s angel does to Thesis IX of ‘On the Concept of History’. In the second place, the paper concerns what it is to call a twentieth-century work ‘baroque’. Does this suggest some causal process that links the culture of seventeenth-century Europe with the twentieth? Or is baroque simply descriptive—able to be applied to antiquity or the arts of Asia? Neither is the case; the baroque remains an impure mixture of aesthetics and history. It is a description of an abstract a-historical artistic comportment, but one that makes no sense without a patrilineage of concrete forms. To describe Schwitters as baroque or Romantic, necessarily invokes not only the precedents but a kind of history. This is not the history that explains how modernism came about, but rather what the past now means and has meant. These issues of the potential of history to make and undo our ideas of architecture are not novel, but are suggested by the proximity of Schwitters and Benjamin in the work of Manfredo Tafuri. Schwitters plays an important rôle in Tafuri’s ‘dialectic of the avant-garde’. In the long essay, and the subsequent short book, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, Tafuri uses the model of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment to map and organise his description of the twentieth-century avantgardes. The crisis of culture and the explicitly avant-garde critical movements of the early twentieth century are said to have their origins in the application of reason to nature in eighteenth-century British empiricism, and in the picturesque. Of debates over neo-classical city designs, such as the Napoleonic plan for Milan of 1803, Tafuri writes: The dialectic is the same as that inherent in all modern art over the course of its history, which pits those attempting to dig down into the very bowels of reality in order to know and assimilate its values and shortcomings, against those who want to push beyond reality, to construct ex novo, new realities, new values, new public symbols. . . . [This will] . . . later distinguish Monet from Cézanne, Munch from Braque, Schwitters from Mondrian, Häring from Gropius, Rauschenberg from Vasarely. 283

Mannerism, Baroque, Modern, Avant-Garde: Introduction

The combination of terms proposed in the title of this issue of The Journal of Architecture is almost familiar, or, rather, it addresses a familiar taste for juxtaposition. An unlikely assemblage of terms such as these, where modern artistic comportment clashes with period styles, is itself a kind of trope. The formal corollary of this taste is perhaps even more familiar, as in those pages of Space, Time and Architecture (1941) where Sigfried Giedion puts Vladimir Tatlin’s tower for the Third International alongside Francesco Borromini’s spire for Sant Ivo alla Sapienza. We might be over-familiar with the game of putting the baroque on the table of the avant-garde along with the sewing machine and the umbrella. The papers presented here do not repeat this formula per se but rather look to specific moments in twentieth-century architectural discourse where the baroque has been put on the table. They each ask of the interests that were served in doing so, and of the consequences for understanding the era of architectural development spanning from the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth, where the concept of the baroque, as a mobile anchor to this period, has itself developed through the uses to which it has been put by historians, artists and architects. The papers are some of those sketched out at a session of the first meeting of the European Avant-garde Studies Association, held in Ghent in May, 2008. That the session drew something of an audience from the largely literary modernists attests to a degree of familiarity with the ideas underpinning this issue: that a relationship between the baroque and the avant-garde is not a novelty but itself the stuff of history, and that architecture is a pivotal moment for this juxtaposition. There are points in twentieth-century architecture where the relation of time and history seems particularly malleable. This is clearest in the sandpit that the architecture of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Rome has been for various players in twentieth-century modernism. Baroque and avant-garde are perfectly balanced terms around which to consider the rôle of history in modern architecture. Classicism and the gothic are each in their separate ways irreducibly connected in the nineteenthand twentieth-century mind to a call to order, to a demand that the present accords with its history so that the future can unfold in the proper manner. When modernists call on the baroque, by contrast, this has served as a principle of the disorder in which the past and the future combine to denature the present. The baroque is, as Walter Benjamin puts it, the sovereign opponent of classicism, the moment in which the projects for a future can conspire with the concreteness of the past to question the necessity of the present being as it is. Baroque is itself a modern term, already avantgarde in the sense described above in that it proposed a value judgement about the past that was also a prognosis. Jacob Burckhardt regularised the term to describe what he saw as a resilement from the canons of the Renaissance, which were to be re-established in neoclassicism. But for architects 239

Tafuri as theorist

Few writers on architecture have been as important to the introduction of a political perspective on architectural production as Manfredo Tafuri. By historicising Manfredos reception in the English-speaking world, widely shared perceptions of his position on theorys place in architectural culture are challenged

The picturesque movement-effect: Motion and Architectural affects in Wolfflin and Benjamin

The author discusses the concept of movement in architecture by drawing a distinction between motion and movement by referring to the texts of art historians Heinrich Wolfflin and Walter Benjamin.

Colonies at home: Loudon's encyclopaedia, and the architecture of forming the self

In the early nineteenth century, the small house in its own garden formed a crucial image of agricultural reform in Britain and in the aspirations of those leaving for North America and Australasia. The material and social technologies of the ‘cottage’ became not only equipment for the colonial enterprise, but a kind of colonization of the home by a new kind of family. These issues are apparent in J. C. Loudons Encyclopaedia where the whole gamut of architecture is re-examined as a subject of interest to agricultural reformers, colonists, democrats and homemakers, especially women.

Urbanist rhetoric: problems and origins in architectural theory

‘Urbanism’ has become a familar posture among architects, so familiar that it has recently become a target for ridicule. The actual developments of cities today make the neo-Sitte-esque contextualism of the 1970s look even more Utopian than the International Style. There are many and varied socio-economic and political determinants in many differing situations which might explain the hopes of the past and their distance from the realities of the present. However, much of the problem with urbanism is not to do with actual urban conditions or the success or failure of particular projects, but rather with how the concept of urbanism was framed in the architectural profession and academy. It ought still to be possible to develop a few operative concepts and a way of having a shared discourse on the architectural aspects of city sites. But at the moment we are caught between vast rhetorical claims for such work as ‘theory’; and a new naturalism that sees the city as generic global and beyond architecture. These notes are intended as a provocation both to the institutionalisation of urbanism and to the idea that it has become passe.