Today We Collect Everything

Author(s): Sylvia Lavin

Source: Perspecta, Vol. 48, AMNESIA (2015), pp. 182-191
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45215809
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 Perspecta 48

Today We Collect Everything

Sylvia Lavin

Over the course 0/2012-12, a team It is no small irony that the history of modernism is the history of
of graduate students and I inves- forgetting. The modern movement famously forged its future in the
tigated the interaction between conflagration of forgetting: Marinetti imagined a fiery crash that
architecture and other visual arts would burn away all remnants of the past at the same moment that
in Los Angeles during the içjos photographs of American grain silos were being stripped of their
as we prepared the exhibition and historical forms, a rite of purification necessary to cleanse moder-
catalog Everything Loose Will nity not only of ornament but of even the memory of ornament.1
Land. Despite a weak historiogra- These well-known acts of erasure were preceded by less-known
phy on the subject, the commonly but just as structurally transformative efforts to induce forgetting.
accepted view was that the archi- In 1803, at the height of the Enlightenment, at the very moment, in
tecture of LA during that period other words, that the modern science of history was being estab-
was artlike and we thus expected lished- Quatremère de Quincy, the most formidable neoclassicist
to find all kinds of traces of links of that era, deliberately excluded data about ancient architecture
between the fields. We conducted developed during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt from his
extensive explorations of many "history" of the origins of architecture. The information was novel,
long-standing and well-organized highly publicized, and "scientifically" gathered, and for these very
archives, sifted through the mis- reasons Quatremère preferred not to contest it. Instead, he simply
cellany of personal collections, and excluded any mention of it from his account.2 Even earlier, when
recorded lengthy oral histories. Claude Perrault instructed architects to side with the Moderns in
the famous seventeenth-century quarrel, it was not just the mythol-
Every passion borders on the ogizing of the classical orders and their proportions that he hoped
chaotic, but the collector's to evacuate from the nascent discipline, but the continuous history
passion borders on the chaos of interpretation and dispute about the orders that many now would
of memories. More than that: consider the very DNA of the discipline.3 Today no such erasures,
the chance, the fate, that suf- exclusions, or omissions are possible because culture operates on
fuse the past before my eyes the premise that nothing can be forgotten or should be consid-
are conspicuously present in ered merely forgettable. The prevailing ethos, disseminated by a
the accustomed confusion of more and more pervasive technological infrastructure, maintains
these books. For what else is that we can, and more importantly should, remember everything.
this collection but a disorder to Architecture increasingly equates its historiography with discipli-
which habit haś accommodat- nary, and historians have replaced architects as the protagonists
ed itself to such an extent that
it can appear as order? waiter Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it
Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and
about Book Collecting," in Illuminations, ed., once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, out. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), (San Diego, New York,

1969), 60. London: Harcourt publishes Ltd, 1975), 144.

182

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/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

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 Perspecta 48

NOTES ON CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE:

Towards a Definition

Peter D. Eisenman

1. For ari example of the use of the term architecture or •environment' as an over-simplified metaphor, see Benedikt, Michael, "Sculpture as Architecture: New
York Letter, 1966-67," ed. by Battcock, Gregory, Minimal Art; A Criticai Anthology, E. P. Outton and Co., Inc., New York, 1968.

2. For an example of such a text, see Panofsky, Erwin, Idea, A Concept in Art Theory, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, S.C., 1968.

3. For example, it is debatable in terms of a conceptual art whether there has been much change in the last fifty years, If one were to, say, compare the work of
Mondrian with, say, a Sol Lewltt.

4. See Karshan, Donald, "The Seventies: Post-Object Art," insert in catalogue, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, Karshan, Donald, The New York Cultural
Center, New York, 1970.

5. Lippard, Lucy R. and Chandler, John, "Thus the difficulty of abstract conceptual art lies not in the idea but in finding the means of expressing that idea so that
it is immediately apparent to the spectator . . . can be considered similar in intention. "The Demateriaiization of Art," Art International, Volume XII, No. 2,
February, 1968.
EISENMAN 1

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 Lavin

of recent histories of architecture.4 The field, in fact, is in the midst Surprisingly these efforts yielded
of a strongly historicist moment that is transforming not only little material documenting explic-
the history of architecture but architecture more broadly as well. itly shared concerns and few
Paradoxically, the mandate to remember facts written out of the moments of direct interpersonal
grand narrative of high modernist architecture was first issued by contact or other traditional forms
someone not thought of as a historian a generation ago, and cer- of evidence used to understand
tainly not thought of as enamored with the impact of historicism on interaction between agents or to
architecture: Reyner Banham, at least in a casual sense, was most calibrate flows of influence and
widely read in his own time as a critic of architects' overattachment interest. Although initially frus-
to historical lore.5 However, his first intellectual stake took the form trating the emptiness of the histor-
of a reminder- and here lies the irony mentioned above- to include ical record ultimately became less a
Marinetti himself and the Futurism for which he stood within the lack or merely a symptom and more
logic of modernism. Banham issued this call in his doctoral thesis, a cornucopia of opportunities and
written under Nikolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld Institute of Art provocations to develop alternative
and published in i960 as Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, forms of argumentation.
where he argued that the neglect of Futurism in accounts of the The key to this potentiality
formation of the modern movement left architecture vulnerable to was the instability and pliancy of
empty formalism and to what he called a mere "machine aesthetic." what turned out to be a hypothet-
Marinetti, who wanted to forget as much as possible himself, could ical archive in formation. It was
not be forgotten. not just that the record was emp-
Banham's emphasis on the importance of remembering more tier than anticipated but that the
(which might have begun in relation to Futurism but ultimately led to nature of evidence- of the constitu-
his insistence on the importance of radically expanding what might tion of facts that might produce a
be considered relevant to the architectural record) has exacted its record- was fantastically unstable.
own revenge: today Banham is being increasingly recast as a his- Archival work is always a mat-
torian rather than a critic. Manfredo Tafuri, on the other hand, ter of tension between the fiction
structured his own legacy so that there could be no such flexibility of evidence and the obdurateness of
in its effects. He explicitly took up history's siren call, using history memory, a struggle between seek-
to arm architecture against the contemporary encroaches of capi- ing proof for an idea that already
talism and making it the dominant mode of discursive engagement appears to be a fact, on the one
with design, even if through a manifestly negative dialectic.6 Tafuri hand, and seeking facts for what
turned history as a corrective into architecture's master discipline. might prove to be ideas, on the other.
The historicist bent of postmodernism during the 1980s needs no As such, it is never a straigh for-
rehearsing here; and while the theoretical turn of the 1990s at first ward process but rather a pleasure
appeared as counter-historical, one principal impact of the recep- inextricably linked to the unex-
tion in the field ofjacques Derrida, who almost always wrote about pected. The emergent archive-
historical philosophical texts, was precisely the emphasis on histo- unindexed, dispersed, and without
riography that accounts for much current writing on architecture.7 limit- increases the potential for
If, as Walter Benjamin argued, history is written by the victors, the uncontrollable. The içyos, the
history is now itself the victor.8 The effects of this regime change subject of our exhibition, is for now
are numerous and remarkably palpable in the institutional structures the historical period that is passing
that constitute the technical support for the manufacture of con- from memory into history, a tran-
temporary history. The profession of historian, for example, is being sition that is further adding to the
radically restructured, or rather professionalized, in a new way. Well convulsive shifts in the nature of
into the 1950s, no specialized degree was required to profess the " the facts" and their documentation

'*5

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 Perspecta 48

inherent to an archive. For exam- history of architecture. When during the 1960s American universi-
ple, since no " evidence " of histori- ties increasingly required a PhD of anyone involved in conferring a
cal relation between the craftiness PhD, a professional degree in the practice of architecture was often
of Mike Kelley's work and the aes- used as a substitute. At least one by-product of this history was a form
thetic of the everyday promoted by of institutional intimacy between history and design, since often the
firms like Morphosis and others same person taught both subjects in schools or departments of archi-
was found, a curatorial strategy to tecture.9 Today, in contrast, PhDs in architectural history are much
provoke a retroactive dialog devel- less casually given. Not only is it increasingly necessary to hold a
oped. These plans were thwarted
by Kelley's sudden suicide, which
plunged the works that until that
moment belonged to him into pro-
bate court, where they were caught
in a limbo between the studio and
the archive, and hence between
different kinds of claims to their
memory. His death also triggered
a massive worldwide appetite for
his work, including interest from

The production of papers is

acknowledged by participants
as the main objective of their
activity. The realization of this
objective necessitates a chain
of writing operations from a re-
sult first scribbled on a sheet
of paper and enthusiastically
communicated to colleagues,
to the final registering of pub-
lished literature in the lab-
oratory archives. The many
intermediary stages (such as
talks with slides, circulation
of preprints, and so on) all
concern literary production of
one kind or another. It is thus
necessary carefully to study
the various processes of lit- PhD to confer one, it is now increasingly necessary to hold a PhD to
erary production which lead teach the history of architecture even to those, like architects, who
tO the Output Of papers. Bruno are not going to be professional historians. Furthermore, a growing
Latour and Steve Woolgar, "Documents and percentage of the most sought-after applicants to architectural his-
Facts," in Laboratory Life: The Construction tory programs in recent years have not held professional degrees in
of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton architecture but rather are trained in the humanities. These increas-
University Press, 1986), 71. ingly distant academic formations and professional specializations

186

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 Lavin

point to a future in which architectural historians and architects will architects who had previously been
have the same kind of institutional relationship as art historians have utteriy disinterested and who now,
with artists- which is to say, no relation at all. For the most part, without anyone to contradict them,
practicing artists do not teach the history of art at the university claimed natural allegiance with the
level (where art is generally taught in art schools and art history in artist. What had begun as fact and
the humanities), and it has long been commonplace for art historians then turned into fiction, ended up
to consider the artist/historian with contempt. as a false memory, a myth that
The architectural historian, like the art historian, is now fully was much more interesting than
bonded, licensed, and insured. Meanwhile an inverse series of trans- the truth.

formations are restructuring the habits of museums and collecting Many similar although less
institutions. On the one hand, the culture of collecting in architec- tragic versions of this quixotic turn
ture that was spurred by the development of a market for archi- of events took place over the course
tectural drawings in the 1990s continues unabated. Architects are of our research. Exponentially
increasingly self-conscious about preserving their materials and of oversized frames were made for
establishing ways of construing what they have in their offices and Archigram collages because a
studios as "archives," just as institutions, often in competition with glitch in data transmission con-
one another, work hard to procure these collections. On the other fused centimeters for feet. Rather
hand, more important than the simple appetite for archives is the than a simple mathematical error,
fact that they are no longer considered a naturally occurring or however, this misunderstanding of
organically coherent body of material, isomorphic with the shape of scale was made plausible by the
a life, be it human or institutional (eg., the Mies Archive, the CIAM media-ready images themselves :
Papers). The "completeness" required by this notion of coherence the objects were meticulously hand-
implies a substantial amount of material, which means that a tra- crafted precisely to produce images
ditionally conceived "total archive" requires significant storage and that could migrate from medium
other infrastructural support that most institutions can no longer to medium and scale to scale with-

afford. More important than this financial constraint, however, is out loss of fidelity. As a result, it
the fact that institutions prefer not to accommodate or serve the was possible to both know and
interests of naturally occurring archives.10 With a much more acti- not know the images at the same
vated sense of ambition and agency, institutions now sift and sort time. Attributions had to be man-

material while it is in limbo between the living memory of the ufactured because women previ-
architect's studio and traditional archives conceived of as reposito- ously minimized in the record, like
ries of knowledge to be used by historians. The emergent archive is Denise Scott Brown, had to be more
a structure that is designed in this liminal zone that belongs neither fully acknowledged, even if adding
to present nor past and is the natural purview of neither historian their names contradicted the docu-
nor architect. ments. We had to field complaints
from certain artists, such as Maria
Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word Nordman, who were displeased by
"archive." [...] With the irreplaceable singularity of a document our selection of works to be used as
to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original exhibition material. However, the
uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once particular objects selected belonged
offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded to archives and no longer to the art-
from technical iteration and reproduction. Nothing is thus more ists who had produced them, and
troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in hence were legally unencumbered
this word 'archive.' Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitc, "Archive Fever: A Freudian by artistic intention. Conversely
Impression," Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 57. a drawing by Andrew Holmes,

i8j

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 Perspecta 48

an architect who produces photo- "The archive" is a new category of architectural object, and its
realistic renderings that circulate contours, modes of manufacture, and value can be analyzed with the
through the art market, could not same techniques used to consider a more conventional architectural
be shown because the drawing in object such as a building, drawing, or book.11 No longer found, the
question had been sold and resold archive is produced by the act of information extraction that trans-
until no one, not even Andrew, forms a collection of things into a momentary coherence. The active
could locate the original. and visible design of the archive lays bare its once feigned neutrality:
These peregrinations, that just as there is no natural ground for buildings to innocently sit upon
together anticipate structural but rather always a process preceding building that transforms the
changes in the way historical
material will be accessed in the [T]hese pictures no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque
future, reached their most convo- flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe cor-
luted state in the search for the respondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The
one piece of evidence that should flatbed picture plan makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfac-
have been able to bear witness to es such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards- any
a direct and active intersection receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data
between the art world and archi- is entered, on which information may be received, printed, im-
tecture: sometime in içqç a con- pressed-whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of
versation took place in the then the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orien-
recently completed Frank Gehry tation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue
House between Gehry, Michael of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.
Asher, Benjamin Buchloh, and Leo Steinberg, "The Flat Bed Picture Company," in Other Criteria : Confrontations with Twentieth

Daniel Buren, triggered by the Century Art ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 55-92.

188

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 Lavin

ground into a site, there never was a naturally occurring foundation establishment of MOCA and the
for a body of material within an archive. The new archive is not con- design for what would be called
cerned with unities or wholeness; it is not isomorphic with a single the Temporary Contemporary.
author, a complete opus, or often not even with an entire work or Getting a taste of this incongru-
project. Instead it is often organized around partial objects, archae- ous concoction of institutional cri-
ologies of themes and concepts, and events: categories that do not tiquen and institution architects ,
lend themselves to wholeness. This fragmentation- often reinforced moving in on the ground floor of
by the collective means of archive production- succeeds in warding a structure that imagined itself to
off the traditional archive's tendency to substantiate hagiography be an anti-institution , became an
while permitting other forms of authorship to emerge.12 intoxicating desire. Who would
The archive can also be ground zero for new forms of mythol- not want to know what was said Ì

ogizing, particularly those that celebrate crowdsourcing, data min- Each conversant acknowledged
ing, and other contemporary
means of naturalizing every-
thing from gossip and rumor
to trivia and epistemologi-
ca! flotsam and jetsam as fact.
Without constraints, the archi-
tectural archive risks becoming
an eBay of information through
which everyone drifts like arm-
chair data tourists. Unlike the
avant-garde flea market, which
the Surrealists argued permit-
ted unlimited new objects to
emerge since discovery was
conceived as an act of projec-
tion generated by the beholder
rather than an attribute of the object itself, on eBay every object has that the conversation did in fact
already been discovered and classified. Instead of renewable pro- take place and each claimed that
jections, eBay focuses on the assignment of monetary value.13 The a tape recording had been made of
reduction of all things to their place in the market is productive in the conversation, in other words,
some regards- unconcerned with the difference between real and that at the time, the conversation
fake, for example, the logic of eBay both permits the collection of was already imagined to be worth
real fakes on an unimaginable scale and expands the centripetal remembering. A couple of the par-
force outside of the architectural discipline, generated by what Mel ticipants were quite confident that
Bochner once called working drawings and other things not nor- Buren ended up with the tape. No
mally considered "architecture," toward an infinite flicker stream tape was ever found. I decided
of images, those visual databases of ephemera that are the digital to stage a redo- to hold the con-
analog of the marginalia of previous eras.14 However, through this versation again, to see what pro-
virtualization additional values infiltrate the logic of the archive: voking four different memories of
not just the spectacle culture associated with the visual orientation this conversation would produce
of postmodernity in general but searchability, popularity, and other in the present. 1 sent an invitation
criteria invented by the accession protocols of contemporary search via e-mail on October 14, 2012.
engines and other related technologies. Asher died while the email was in

189

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 Perspecta 48

transit, leaving the conversation "But today we collect ads," wrote the Smithsons in 1956.15
unclaimed by the false certainty of In today's today we collect everything, and are increasingly sur-
memory and the certain falsehoods rounded by archival piles and wallpapers. Like most hoarders, we
of history, loose and available for have a propensity to collect certain things, and the focus of con-
future imaginingsf temporary archive appetites is material from the late 1960s and
'70s. On the one hand, the figures at work during that period are
This is not a book of history. nearing death, an expected eventuality that is unexpectedly gen-
The selection found here was erating feverish interest in keeping their memories alive. A more
guided by nothing more sub- important if less articulated reason for the attraction, however, is
stantial than my state, my the fact that much work from that period was already reflecting on
pleasure, an emotion, laugh- the implications of the archive as a work product. As is well known
ter, surprise, a certain dread, in the history of art, Bochner, Asher, and Harald Szeemann, to
or some other feeling whose name just a few examples close to architecture, established con-
intensity I might have trou- ceptual approaches to understanding the archive's administration
ble justifying, now that the in specifically aesthetic terms.16 Although today's emergent archive
first moment of discovery has is more vast, pliable, and volatile than they could have imagined,
passed. [. . .] And then it had to their work signals the importance of giving aesthetic specificity to
be just this document, among the contemporary archive. Further, it argues that this specificity
so many others scattered and transforms the way beholders engage with information and insists
lost, which came down to us on the decisive issue of how means of access and organizational
and be rediscovered and read. systems are designed. It is essential to exploit the productive design
So that between these people potential of the archive as an architectural object in order to resist
of no importance and us who its too rapid conversion into a new normal system of evidence. This
have no more importance than is to say that the remembered thing is a thing in stasis, trapped in
they, there is no necessary the subjective privilege of whoever remembers it and always at risk
connection. Nothing made it of being reduced to mere facts. Objects, agents, and events require
likely for them to emerge from passage through a period of infantile amnesia, a moment without
the shadows [...] The com- memory or belonging: their most transformative work takes place
monplace ceased to belong to in that interval between escaping the clutches of personal memory
silence, to the passing rumor and being subsumed into history.
the fleeting confession. All
those ingredients of the ordi-
nary, the unimportant detail,
obscurity, unexceptional days,
community life, could and
must be told- better still, writ-
ten down. They became de-
scribable and transcribable,
precisely insofar as they were
traversed by the mechanisms
Of a political power. Michel
Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," in The

Essential Foucault: 1954-1984, edited by

Paul Rabinów (New York: The New Press,

1994), 157-175.

iço

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 Lavin

Notes Notes

i See the opening lines of F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," Le Figaro, February 20, 1909. Le f See Sylvia Lavin, Everything Loose Will Land:
Corbusier 's long unnoticed manipulation of the photographs in Walter Gropius's Jahrbuch de Deutschen Werkbundes is Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1970s
by now a well-known episode in the history of Modernism. For one of the earliest accounts, see Paul Venable Turner, (Nürnberg: Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 201g).
The Education of Le Corbusier (New York: Garland Publishing, 19 77).

2 See Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1992).

3 There is by now a significant literature on architecture's entry into the querelle. Two distinct points of view can be
found in Alberto Perez-Gomez's introduction to Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients,
by Claude Perrault, trans. Indra Kagiz-McEwen (Santa Monica, California: Getty Center, 1993); and Lucia Allais,
"Ordering the Orders: Claude Perrault 's Ordonnance and the Eastern Colonnade of the Louvre," Future Anterior 2,
no. 2 (2005): 52-74.

4 One only needs to look at the list of recent titles from architectural publishers such as MIT Press, Princeton
Architectural Press, or Yale University Press to notice that the majority of authors are professional historians rather
than practicing architects.

5 According to Peter Hall, in his foreword to Reyner Banham's A Critic Writes, "Paul Barker [the editor of New Society]
gave [Banham] virtual carte blanche in his monthly column, 'Society and Design.' Most of his best writing, outside
the big books, certainly the most perceptive, appeared there between 1965 and his death in 1988." See A Critic
Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham, ed. Mary Banham, Sutherland Lyall, Cedric Price, and Peter Hall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), xiii.

6 Key texts by Tafuri on the role of history include "Introduction: The Historical Project," in The Sphere and the
Labyrinth, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987); and
Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). See also Gevork
Hartoonian, "Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuri's Flight," Art Criticism 17, no. 2 (2002): 28-40; Andrew Leach,
Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent, Belgium: A&S University of Ghent, 2007); Anthony Vidier, "Renaissance
Modernism: Manfredo Tafuri" in Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 156-189; James S. Ackermann, "The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri,"
Casabella 619-20 (1995): 165-7.

7 See Jacques Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," New Political Science 15 (Summer, 1986): 7-15; and Jacques
Derrida, "Preface" and "Writing Before the Letter," in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), lxxxix-93.

8 See Thesis VII in Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969).

9 For some recent views on architecture in the academy, see Zeynep Celik Alexander, "Neo-Naturalism," Log 31
(2014): 23-30; and John Harwood, "How Useful? The Stakes of Architecture History, Theory, and Criticism at MIT,
1945-1976," in A Second Modernism, MIT, Architecture, and the "Techno-Social" Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: SA+P Press with MIT Press, 2013), 106-43.

10 A history of recent transformations in the collecting practices of those institutions that significantly shape the field by
determining the shape of architectural archives- notably the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Getty Research
Institute, the Avery Library, MoMA, and the RBI- has yet to be written.

ii Contemporary exhibition practices have been significantly transformed by the archival turn, just as the exhibition
as platform has been an essential instrument in the efforts to disseminate "the archive." The research exhibition that
presents documents, arguments, and data rather than objects- or rather, that designs the presentation of documents,
arguments, and data using all the design tools available today- is a growing presence in museums and curatorial
work. Recent examples include Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Matthew Monteith's The Look (2013), for the DESTE
Foundation's "capsule collection"; and the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Journeys: How Traveling Fruit, Ideas,
and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (2010), which examines physical changes triggered by exchanges across
environmental, architectural, and geopolitical parameters. The largest-scale example is "Fundamentals," the Venice
Architecture Biennale 2014, focused on displays of research in twentieth-century architecture.

12 The research that undergirds the archival turn often begins in university settings, where design and architectural
history students increasingly work in more collectivized as well as hierarchical ways, closely resembling the mode
in the sciences, where faculty set topics and students produce research. Potentially this structure will simultaneously
limit the kinds of things that get researched as topics are defined by fewer and fewer agents as well as broadly promote
an interest in using research as an architectural medium.
Images
13 EBay assigns value at a speed and precision far beyond the already impressive systems of value produced in essays
such as Alois Riegl's "Cult of Monuments" or in Emilio Ambasz's almost Borgesian system for discriminating between
kinds of domestic object. See Alois Riegl, "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin," trans. K. 1 Andy Warhol, Time Capsule 44, Components,
W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982), 20-51; and Emilio Ambasz's exhibition Italy: The New Domestic photograph.
Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, 1972.
2 Peter Eisenman, "Notes on Conceptual Architecture:
14 EBay, Flickr, and other digital platforms that conflate things, their distribution, and social formations constitute Towards a Definition," image of the original text, 1 970.
a radical transformation to the flows of mass-produced consumer goods and kitsch items, as described in John
McHale, "The Plastic Parthenon" [1967], in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dörfles (New York: Universe 3 Haus-Rucker-Co, Info Sheet from Giant Billiard,
Books, 1969). 1970.

15 See Alison and Peter Smithson, "But Today We Collect Ads," Ark 18 (1956). 4 Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO, Display of Displays,
Exhibition in Manège Hall and Shuvalov Passage of
16 The essential essay here remains Benjamin Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-69: From the Aesthetic of Administration the Hermitage Museum, 2014. Concept collage for
to the Critique of Institutions," October 55 (1990): 105-43. On Harald Szeemann, see the catalog of Germano Celant's the exhibition.
recreation of his 1969 show Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Germano Celant, When Attitudes Become
Form: Bern içóç/Venice (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2013). 5 MOS Architects, Rainbow Vomit, model of the instal-
lation at the Creators Project Network, 2010.
17 As Gilles Deleuze protested when asked to give a more thorough autobiographical account of his work, "Arguments
from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments." See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. 6 Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending, 2001. One from a
Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 11-12. set of 20 etchings.

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