Postmodern architects as theorists: the case of the essay collection (1988-1998)
Résumé
From the late 1980s, a proliferation of essay collections themed around the concepts of gender, sexuality and race appeared on the North American architectural scene. Typically edited by one, two or three people, these volumes assembled essays by a diversity of authors, presenting multiple approaches to a common theme. Most often (though not always), they arose from institutionally organized lectures, conferences or symposiums. Their editors and authors also initiated and participated in a range of other media, imagined as forums for theory in and around architecture: The journal Assemblage as well as exhibitions such as Queer Space (Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1994), The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (Cooper- Hewitt, National Design Museum, 1993) and House Rules (Wexner Center for the Arts, 1994), are but a few examples of these platforms for the participation in intellectual exchanges, complementing lectures and teaching.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. It takes as a case study essay collections published in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with concepts of gender, sexuality and race and analyses the nature and organization of this publication format as a way to read and reflect on their respective scopes. First, it considers the essay collection as a format that elicits a postmodern reading, that is, a construction based on difference and discontinuity, which privileges a diversity of concepts, methods and contexts of enunciation, forming, in the manner of interdisciplinary studies, meeting places of heterogeneous knowledge. Such exchanges were not common in architecture, and it is clear that the texts of these collections sought above all to problematize points where modern certainties seemed at an impasse. Here the word ‘postmodern’ is understood not as a negation
of modernity but rather as an affirmation of plurality, of interdisciplinarity, calling into question existing canons by decentring and challenging master narratives. In the first part, devoted to the format of the essay collection, three main elements will be considered: the structure of the volume, the selection of texts as well as the origins of their contents, and their contexts.