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Radical
Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s' Architecture
by Lara Schrijver
NAi Publishers, 2009
Paperback, 248 pages
Even though the 1960's are now nearly
forty years old, the decade's impact on all sorts of cultural
production, including architecture and urbanism, still resonates.
TU
Delft professor Lara Schrijver sees the lingering influence
of the Situationist
International, Archigram,
Venturi and
Scott Brown, and others as problematic, since she sees
these groups' projects as reactions to modernism and therefore
incomplete alternatives to modernism's failings. In three
chapters (city, technology, architecture), Schrijver examines
the radical critiques of the above three groups respectively.
While many readers might be familiar with the output of
each in that decade, primarily at the level of text or drawing
in each case, the author's hones in on the relationship
of their critiques to modernism, reaching the above conclusion.
The basic argument of the book is that contemporary practice
needs to develop its own approaches to today's problems
instead of emulating the admittedly optimistic and revolutionary
period four decades ago.
Schrijver's writing is academic but
still readable by a wider audience interested in architectural
theory. Beyond the situationists, the Archigram group, and
Venturi and Scott Brown, the references stick to about a
handful of influential voices, such as Alan Colquhoun, Henri
Lefebvre, Bruno Latour, and Marshall McLuhan. These polemical
blinders, if you will, actually strengthen Schrijver's argument,
while also allowing those unfamiliar with them to gleam
some insight into their writing. But even though she illustrates
how at least these three groups critiques of modernism were
limited by their oppositional stance to the movement, the
book's conclusion seems detached from the preceding. Discussing
critique, "projective
architecture" and the theory/practice rift in architecture,
Schrijver's alternative for contemporary practice is more
grounded in Richard
Sennett's most recent book instead of her own. If critique
and projective architecture are eschewed only because they
share the oppositional stance of the sixties movements,
is that enough of a justification for another alternative(s)?
Maybe not, but Schrijver's call for craft, in Sennett's
sense of the term, will find sympathies with a number of
architects, including this one.
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