SADIA SHIRAZI

There is as of yet no significant critical theory that guides the current production and critique of architectural form. Impelled by or resulting from this theoretical void, cultural institutions have sidelined architectural form in favor of complementary entities such as "the urban," "the digital," and "sustainability." This does not mean that the dominant theoretical topics of an earlier age are now defunct. On the contrary, they linger around, underlying contemporary discourse, unacknowledged yet still determinant.

Treading on the toes of many disciplines, "formalism" continues to confound its allies and enemies alike. In literary theory, formalism is most closely associated with the Russian formalists, in art history with the theorist Clement Greenberg, and in architecture with Colin Rowe. Formalism is essentially a debate regarding the dichotomy between form and content. This most generic understanding of formalism is that artistic/architectural form may be understood autonomously, without reference to context (historical, cultural, social, political, material, etc.). To better understand the fragility of the term and its tendentious position, we can look to the feud between conceptual art and Greenberg's formalism in the 1960's. By combining and appropriating mediums and methods of other fields, conceptual artists dissolved the integrity of artistic method as field-specific, a distinction Greenberg had previously touted. Meaning was no longer implicit but became contextual. Others have argued that Greenberg himself was a bad formalist, and had he been otherwise, the validity of formalist methods would have been less denigrated. The confusion regarding formalism's character is based both on misuse and misappropriations as well as formalism's own abuses, which lead one to question whether formalism was ever or is even now a stable, theoretical proposition. The tenets of formalism have reformed and rebanded to the point where one cannot locate a formalist epistemology within art and architecture. It can only be identified as multiple formalisms. Formalism has moved from a singular definition to a plural one, or perhaps the confusion over its definition has always been due to the fact that even Greenbergian formalism was in fact Formalisms.

The contributors to thresholds 33: Formalisms bring to light a series of debates within which formalism is embedded- challenging, celebrating, and denuding formalists and formalism as a stable entity itself.

History/Theory

Peter Eisenman draws Edward Said's idea of Late Style into the realm of architecture. He writes that we now find ourselves in a unique period of lateness, a 'modernist endgame,' where architecture resists readings that privilege the optical. He argues that architecture need not continue grappling dialectically with the metaphysics of presence, and points instead towards emergent possibilities in which architecture offers new modes of seeing. Mark Jarzombek revisits early Eisenman and rereads his 1976 essay "Notes on Conceptual Architecture," revealing its implicit argument regarding architecture as a conceptual project. Caroline Jones revisits Greenberg's Laocoön, postulating that formalism, for Clem, regulated the erotic of the male gaze, and that modernism was not only made by Clement but made Clem into Greenberg. Charles Hailey takes the structure of Susan Sontag's seminal Notes on Camp as a basis for his own notation of the post-disaster cap and its exigencies. Lydia Kallipoliti revisits Venturi and Scott Brown's seminal duck and decorated shed, demonstrating the authors' literal formal fixation with Vegas' strip architecture and their subsequent oversight of its electrical substructure. Nana Last looks at formalism pre and post-1960's, demonstrating the way in which formalism's epistemological basis has moved from exclusion to inclusion and examines the nuances within formalism, which is no longer simply accepted or rejected. Olga Touloumi tells a story in which the discovery of a fosetta in the late 19th century fuels the collaboration in Italy between criminal anthropology and prison architecture, in which one field tries cataloguing the visual patterms of the multiplying criminal body while the other produces a standardized cell built around one. Enrique Gualberto Ramirez attempts a formal reading of Erich Mendelsohn's, Konrad Wachsmann's, and Antonin Raymond's designs for the Army and Standard Oil, who were hired by the Chemical Warfare Service, a branch of the US Army, to test the efficacy of napalm on architectural reproductions of Japanese and German housing in 1947. Alexander D'Hooghe pays homage to formalist debates regarding transparency, describing how conceptual abstraction was altered through distinct material deployment, and ultimately how the abstraction of flat glass ultimately affects public space and the private sphere.

Blending into Art, Architecture, and Urbanism, Kaustuv DeBiswas and Sadia Shirazi's K9 Computation tells a story that shifts between a critical essay and a design project, ultimately presenting an authored meta-diagram that produces authorless and seemingly limitless essays.¹

Art/ Architecture/Urbanism

The interview with Egyptian artist Chant Avedissian deals with issues of autonomy, hegemony, and identity in art, and also takes on popular culture, International Tribunals, and the adobe brick. Tad Hirsch and the Institute for Applied Autonomy's Terminal Air illustrates the practice of informal transfers of suspects to territories outside of the US for torture from the perspective of the extraordinary rendition travel agent; view plane models, flight routes, and private companies that charter flights to black sites. Fight Club is a transcript of the ideological brawl between Yung Ho Chang, a fabricist, and Alexander D'Hooghe, a monumentalist; Sanford Kwinter referees, keeping the two architects in check. "Guangming: New Radiant City" offers a critical attitude towards the modernist master plan, proposing a new town for 600,000 that, instead of delineating regions for leisure and work instead creates open parameters for the city, designing city blocks instead of defining programmatic occupation. Jennifer Tran and James Shen's "China in London" imagines the future of the metropolis after the oil crisis, and conjures up a streetless city-scape in which the dualities of exterior and interior, public and private are collapsed. J. MeeJin Yoon's "LOOP" investigates materiality and form through digital and material processes in a Voronoi based porous landscape for the P.S. 1 competition. The project looks responsibly at materials, structurally at form, and innovatively deals with production and materiality. Tackling issues of form and digitality, Adam Modesitt's "Shingles" takes the vernacular typology of the shingle and frees it from its subservience to complex form in construction methodology, allowing it, instead, to become an increasingly grotesque generator of form itself. Emily White's "Vector Paradise" locates the strength of the digital in its processing power - form is resultant, material is generative, and parameters are primary, positing a novel way of seeing architectural form today.