“We forgot about buildings,” claims Dora Epstein Jones in this provocative essay for The Building, a new volume edited by José Aragüez and published by Lars Müller, featured here as part of Archinect’s recurring series Screen/Print.

At first glance, it’s a strange assertion to make about the discipline, considering that, for the average person, a ‘building’ is pretty much the first thing that you think about when you hear the word ‘architecture.’ But, for the last fifty or so years, buildings have moved away from the center of architectural discourse. “They became normative,” writes Epstein Jones, “then supplementary, then the mere material for forces, fields, and flows to act upon.” Alongside the ascendance of Tafurian materialism, of Deleuzian metaphors, of Derridean interrogations, de-centering ‘the building’ enabled an expansion of the field’s purview—and this certainly had its merits. In this essay, Epstein Jones forcefully argues that today the building, as object, should serve as the orienting point for thinking about architecture. But, for her, this is not a return, per se, and certainly not one towards the (limited) conversations of our grandfathers. Rather, we can focus on buildings without excluding the extra-disciplinary concerns that originally pushed them away. Here, ‘the building’ becomes a foundation upon which to further build.

The essay well-encapsulates the concerns of The Building. “For nearly fifty years ‘the building’ has primarily been viewed as a means rather than an end within architectural history and theory,” reads the blurb. “This volume presents an alternative to that trend by re-conceiving it as a central discursive category in its own right.” But Epstein Jones’ text is also something of an outlier: the majority of texts in the book focus on a singular building, constructed from the late 1980s to the present. By closely analyzing these structures, the forty-three contributors are able to consider both the discipline and domains far beyond its reach.

Buildings, or How to Let Go of Forgetting

by Dora Epstein Jones

[T]radition proceeds by what might be called “selective amnesia,” each generation forgetting anything that had ceased to be of interest in order to find room for new matters of interest that had come up in its own time.
— Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking” (1960)

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. — Marie Antoinette

In the course of the last fifty years, what once began with the 1960s 
but became the much more generous “postwar,” buildings lost their preeminent status in our discipline. They became normative, then supplementary, then the mere material for forces, fields, and flows to act upon. We satisfied ourselves with the temporary. We argued for the ontological presence of drawings and un-built work and myriad other non-material substitutes. We asserted the presence of architecture as 
an idea, even if the idea was tyrannical or powerful. The building, deemed arbitrary, slipped away. [1] We forgot about buildings.

The forgetting of buildings was no accident. It was intentional and, in its time, necessary. The critical mantra of forgetting, as arrogant as it may sound to us now, was a positive tactic — an empowering one. Baudrillard asked us to forget Foucault, Foucault to forget Baudrillard. Forgetting diminishes, lessens the blow, suspends the contradiction. The effect, or even intention, of forgetting is imagined as a form of release from the chains of ideology. As in Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air and subsequent feminist ambitions for architectural discourse, the promise of forgetting was to allow for the possibility of a radical refiguring of the concept, free from the hardness of material properties while still asserting the existence of the thing. [2] When we “forgot” buildings, we untethered ourselves from the fact-ness of buildings — the historically white
 male privilege of designing them, the institutional hegemonies that have secured their domains through producing them, the capitalist machinations required to construct and maintain them, even the built environment in which they dwell — that had for so long been the locus of all kinds of oppressive tactics, overt or not.

The forgetting of buildings was no accident. It was intentional and, in its time, necessary.

Of course, there were many discursive preconditions for
 a decisive victory of architectural discourse over the dominion of the building. Bataille’s Encyclopedia Acephalica, derived from an incautious marriage of Diderot to Breton, equated architecture with buildings and slaughterhouses, while Victor Hugo’s “This Will Kill That” forever impressed us with the sense that the building, as an outright sign 
of papal authority, could fade, die, or be murdered. Thus, by the age of the critical challenge to authority in the postwar period, it was retrospectively very likely that the building as place-of-authority would become Victim #1 in any movement away from lasting hegemony. Almost any Marxist line of thought will bring one quickly to the material fact of the building and its automatic placement within a realm of exchanges (monetary and labor), if not also its design trajectory: from the little territories of architectural pedagogy to architectural tooling, to architectural classification to architectural engineering, city codes, real estate, corporate symbology, and so forth. Therefore, any liberatory concept must first forget (or suspend) that realm in which the building exists. With major works made less major-ly, or dispelled altogether, minor reterritorializations could, and did, proliferate.

“Forgetting” the building allowed architecture, as a field of study, to exist within a freer zone. Without material affect or direct design mandate (i.e., to design buildings), architecture could be about many other aspects of the human experience. Space could refer to the critical space of the body or the space of the eye. Meaning could be transferred to the incidents of the individual and empowered subject. Placemaking (the substitute ethic) could happen as art, as intervention, as happening — and could be lauded for any perceptible resistance to codes or zones or any whiff of the canonic, the monumental, or the normative. Critical evolution necessitated a turning away and, for all kinds of good and bad reasons, equivocated the building-as-building as a primary source of architecture’s complicity with power. We 
called bicycle sheds “Architecture,” and Pevsner-be-damned, we were empowered by it.

In some cases, fingers were pointed: Tafuri and the helplessness of the building as a stand-in for ideological control; Tschumi in his description of violence; and/or the troubling relationship between building-as-text and text-as-authored that stemmed from the post-structuralist camp. Deliberate erasing occurred: Eisenman and the floating, changing axonometric; Koolhaas and La Defense; or Libeskind and the many scales of Micro-megas. Groundlessness, from Archigram to Cedric Price to Wolf Prix; or destruction, from Ant Farm to Lebbeus Woods to, again, Wolf Prix — the building was understood as frontline cannon fodder for all kinds of disciplinary encroachments, defeats, and boots-on-the-ground warfare.

But that was 30-plus years ago.

I am for the continuous and constant presence of buildings
 as the number-one source of architectural knowledge in our discipline. I can admire and enjoy how crucial “forgetting” has been to opening the valves of discussion — and how the very process of forgetting has contributed to a much more generous view of the discipline that
 has now rather consistently welcomed dissent and debate. But I am done with forgetting.

With the building forgotten, we were no longer bound to a supposed 1:1 relationship of the building to its architecture, as it had been expressed from Viollet-le-Duc on through modernism. Yet after the era 
of Deleuze, the suggestion of matter as folded, pliant, and supple — and the ways in which those qualities can be readily translated into floor plates, corners, edges, and other building forms — has meant that the materialization and not the actual building was the convenient, hegemonic, and ultimately disposable fiction of authority. Now, we can recognize
 that we have embarked upon an emerging paradigm of post-forgetting, of not seeing the world as binary or constructed, materialized or not, 
but as essentially multiple, present, and possibly material without referent, definitive coding, or ideal semiotic. We are in a beautiful new era . . . almost.

I am for the continuous and constant presence of buildings
 as the number-one source of architectural knowledge in our discipline.

It seems to be a strange reach: to hold a series of conferences, and to work with such fervor to produce an ambitious book . . . on buildings. In architecture. We do not think of folks in biology saying, “Whoa, let’s do a book on living organisms,” or journalists getting together for a conference about whether or not we should have news. We sometimes forget what we look like to non-architects, and how inane 
it may seem when we say, “it’s a very revolutionary book about buildings in architecture...”

The upshot, however difficult this may be to explain to biologists or journalists, is that the “end game” that has preceded this book is not at all an absence of buildings as buildings, but a marked inability to substantively assail architecture’s own object. At the heart of our current-day predicament is the rather plausible notion that “architecture” is not about “buildings.” Architecture can include buildings, but its register is at the level of the idea, the concept, and the argument, and our thirty-plus-year history of forgetting has not helped at all in this regard. John McMorrough very neatly summarizes the distinction between the material building and the materialization of the building: “What makes a building? Not its material (the stuff of its construction), but its materialization (how it came to be).”
 Of course, McMorrough’s formula is spot-on Deleuzian (e.g., the social before it is technical), but his conclusion is more indicative of the current predicament. He ventures that his case study embodies “two types of riddles” at once: “MVRDV’s Hannover pavilion seems to be both enigma and conundrum.” He can’t nail down even the most ephemeral and slippery of words because no words can suffice. Like Bataille’s definition of the dictionary, words can only be analogous or indexical. They can play at any one of the operative ideas, but metonymically at best. At their worst, language will cause more damage than the photographs of the ruined future vision, and so, as McMorrough does very cannily throughout the essay, it should be corralled into parentheses and asides. Such caution does not come without a deep history. The building, sure, the building’s OK, especially if it’s been there a while — but the words, oy! Too binding, too specific, too removed, too dangerous in their singularity.

Luckily, the beauty of this collection is that it does not attempt to produce or construct a single set of words. Instead, two essays on Michael Hansmeyer jostle for equivalence despite the fact that one argues for addition while the other argues for complexity. Sou Fujimoto and SANAA, two practices associated with fairly singular tectonics, produce multiple states of “place.” Tschumi, the one person to whom we can trace the idea of the building as “violent,” returns here as “ambivalent” and “intricate.” The authors can do this within this text in large part because 
the source of the revolution is not reversal, not a “going back to buildings,” but instead a new ontological heritage founded in a contemporary discourse that is perhaps more comfortable with the term “object” than with that much maligned, troublesome set of associations with the 
term “building.” Or, as José Aragüez states: “This project suggests that discussions taking the object as their primary concern can today extend the bounds of possibility for the production of discursive knowledge in 
a substantial fashion. In order to do so, it invokes the architectural object par excellence — the building.”

“Object,” at the time of this writing, is very fashionable — which is not at all a liability, and may in fact be the pièce de résistance that ushers in a more widespread re-acceptability of buildings, in much the same way that a Kardashian can make beige look on-trend. More than
 its trendiness, “object” is a looser, more abstract term. Everything is also an object — and so, what separates objects from each other are exactly those aspects that have mattered to architecture all along: shapes, colors, outlines, forms, textures, patterns, disegno. Rather than restrict legibility and code heavily, as buildings tend to do (anyone who has actually built a building has experienced how overwhelming “code,” both semiotic
 and political, matters), “objects” are potentially freer to manifest qualities; and ultimately, an emphasis on the manifestation of qualities allows us to embrace diminished authorship and intent. “Buildings” as “objects” are given an ontological out from their once-pervasive hegemony, a get-out-of-jail-free card from some rather troublesome and lasting issues. Buildings as the “object-par-excellence of architecture” make architecture seem a lot more flexible, a lot more multiple, a lot more contemporary.

Buildings as the “object-par-excellence of architecture” make architecture seem a lot more flexible, a lot more multiple, a lot more contemporary.

Where the strategy of this book could potentially miscarry 
is where the realm of the object butts up against the desire to insist that a building-object could conduct a new electricity of history and theory 
for architecture. The current history-theory project must also be extended for the building-object strategy to work. According to the call, architectural thinking should not depend on what Aragüez refers to as “other domains” of knowledge. Instead, as converted to object, it could, it should, maybe, exist as source-point for architectural discourse.
 The potential problem with that little leap is that, for many in architecture today and in the past (and due perhaps to the university effect), the historian-theorist is generally not the same person, with the same knowledge background, as the architect. In Sylvia Lavin’s piece, “Positive Objects,” her thorough recounting of every quality of the archived sheets, the tactility of her words, is far more evocative to the historian than it is to the architect. She is speaking to the archivist, the writer, the recorder, the essayist, those of us for whom the task is not the making of buildings but the description, the analysis, the entering into discourse that could lie at the heart of what catapults “mere” buildings into architecture . . . and what may have caused us to “forget” buildings some thirty-plus years ago.

If the point of the rescue is to loosen the building from the mores of custom and certitude that once governed it, then it makes little sense to grant the building a greater ontological freedom without extending the same freedom to its critico-historico-attorney-storyteller. And, whether the building-object is actually narrated by the architect, the developer, the viewer, the visitor, the critic, the historian, the theorist,
 or any possible word-user, what it should provide is the exact opposite of coherency, unity, and/or logic. Sylvia Lavin is speaking to an ages-old belief that buildings are unified when she notes: 

. . . [T]he potential posed by the objecthood of architecture lies in the radical contrast between the traditional emphasis on the building as a coherent and singular object — a fiction most often held together by the name of the architect or by viewer perception and narratives of experience — and the infinitude of objects necessarily eliminated to produce the effect of unity. Buildings are an extreme case of a general phenomenon.

While Lavin is mostly concerned with effects as the source of phenomena, and the production of effects as a multitude, her glance at architecture’s scriptor should not be lost. The last paragraph offers up this small but major form of warning: 

The analysis of buildings today thus presents a formidable critical opportunity because architectural discourse is not accustomed to confronting objects or to distributing attention across many objects without relying on narratives of authorship, myths of synthesis, and the easy transubstantiation of material artifacts into images and signs.

In other words, it is nice indeed to grant ontological freedom to the building and to allow it to exist in a multiple, complex, extendable, and hidden reality of objects, but for this recall operation to be successful, we will need to imagine a new form of discourse about buildings.

Whether we are in relationships or parenting or dog training, conflict and misbehavior tend to be best cured through a thorough self-check: not, “Why are they behaving badly?” but “What am I doing wrong?” The path toward resolving conflict is paved with acceptance of others’ differences (key) and a caring revision of our own perceptions. The dog, for example, doesn’t stop chewing the furniture even if you punish him. Instead, we say, “He chews because I leave him for too long,” or “I should not have such delicious furniture.” And so the same logic must hold for building-objects. Building-objects are complex, contradictory, unruly, table-leg-gnawing, beautiful, awe-inspiring, craze-making creatures. They are market-driven and expensive. They are situated and contextual. They make landscapes appear and disappear. They can symbolize. They can even alleviate stress. So, unless we change the stories we tell ourselves, we will not meet the challenge this book presents. Letting go of forgetting is a crucial first step. Remembering at the level of discourse is another.

What is suggested in Lavin’s piece, and throughout this collection, is that modern thought is not yet ready to “remember” the building-object. In order to dislodge modern thought, to accustom it
 to confronting the inherent complexity of objects, the pervasive narrative of holism and unity — i.e. Humanism — will need to be made more comfortable with the ontological freedom that objects seem to already enjoy. In Foucault’s remarkable reading of Kant in “What Is Enlightenment?” the modern affect of self is an embodiment, a double coding of self to systems that seek and desire purity, and the completion of self to system can be likened to the modern world’s “mature adult.”
 In sections titled “(b) Homogeneity” and “(c) Systematicity,” Foucault refers to a homogeneous domain of reference over three areas: “relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself.” Furthermore, the domain of reference, as Foucault points out, is played out strategically in terms of “practical systems,” as in “not the representations that men give of themselves . . . but rather what they do and the way they do it.” For Foucault, the “ontology of the self” has a history, a history that in the modern period includes a constituency of the self based on a desire (not a reality) of wholeness and completion. More salient to architecture, the whole and complete self, according to Foucault, its homogeneity, is “ensured by the realm of practices” that form the basis
 of rationality. In this vein — and again, its crucial to recognize that Foucault was not merely enunciating his view but also reading Kant at a particular historical moment — objects are defined in terms of “rules
 of the game . . . rules of action,” and “problematized” accordingly. Any “generality or problematization in our relations to things” does not belong to the thing, nor to the concrete practice (which Foucault refers to as 
a “test”), but to the historico-critical formulation of rationality or, for that matter, any form of “theoretical coherence.” [3]

What might appear to be “a return” is anything but that.

Ultimately, the historico-critical formulation of architecture — and especially architecture as an idea, thought, position, argument formed within a materialization — and not of the object itself, is the last impediment to letting go of forgetting. In the parlance of feminist studies, the act of rescuing a concept or a forgotten or erased existence (usually biographical) is referred to as a “recovery project.” The recovery project
is one that revives or makes visible what had disappeared or been forgotten in order to place it again onto the shelves of history or for the consideration of theory. At the supposed end of patriarchy, the recovery project was, and is, intended to remind us of a continued central presence of women in the history of the world and its consciousness. [4] What feminist thought did most brilliantly, however, is that once the recovery project was over, it entered into its third wave — its self-described dissolution of binaries in favor of a vast topology of difference, or what Liz Grosz referred to as a “tiny thousand sexes.” [5] Yes, such radical differentiation was at the loss of “agency” in the critical sense, but the undercurrent of absolute sexual and gender range became a much more long-term, much more radical conceptual norm — one that has surely
 led to the greater acceptance of the essential heterogeneity of LGBT peoples the world over. Feminist writers of the contemporary era have very little “theoretical coherence” in the Kantian sense, and may look a lot less oppositional and less confrontational than their forebears,
 but now, like Judith Butler or N. Katherine Hayles, they are free to tackle — more able to engage — the rich complexity of a global, biological, post-human mode of existence.

Given our history of forgetting, and the ways in which it rested on an entire substratum of disciplinary directives, the aim of the recovery here cannot be lost on us. The Building is not about The Building as much as it is a call to discipline: a decisive and specific reassertion
 that there is indeed a discipline called Architecture that is indeed focused on Buildings, as it should be. For writers and architects of my generation and older, this new disciplinarity comes as a bit of a disappointing shock — as in, “We freed up the territory for you; why are you going back?” For writers and architects of my generation and younger, however, it’s 
a perfectly reasonable call to reexamine the source codes of knowledge, to craft and curate amongst the heterogeneity and complexity that was there all along — even if, for a while, it had been forgotten.

The key, however, is that this is not your father’s discipline and it won’t be your father’s The Building. What might appear to be “a return” is anything but that. Focusing in has never been the same as exclusion, even if the two once cohabited a very successful industrial complex of Western thought. Instead, focus can only bring us closer to the Mandelbrot set before us.

One of the more provocative essays in this collection is
 Michael Young’s essay on the “The.” For Young, the “The” is not the stable article of a permanent concept, but, like Foucault’s assertions after
 Kant, a signal of a double coding of self to system. “The” is an imaginary construct, filled with conflict and tension, a sign of the many requisite mediations, those “realms of practices” that ensure rationality as described by Foucault. Following Young, and despite the fact that his essay is geared toward the pieces gathered under the “technology cohort,” I would reiterate his point that The Building exists as a kind of locus between “reality” and “representation,” and I would underline his point that “The importance of ‘the building’ within the multiple mediums of architecture is that it provokes an exploration of its disciplinary relationship to notions of the real.”

For the Freudians among us, the reference to the real is a reference to the Real, and the Real is not at all the cold, hard stuff of reality, but the flip side of consciousness — the chasm of unknowability that was once the Unconscious. “The Real” in the Freudian sense is super scary (fear itself). However, if we divert or analogize it a bit to describe a “the real” at the level of a conscious discipline of architecture, as Young suggests, “the real” is a place at the end of mediation — design mediation, technological mediation, and, to my point, interpretive or discursive mediation. If architecture has a “the real,” then that “the real” could very well be The Building. And, if that can hold, then “The Building” has always lived as a kind of persistent unconscious of architecture. In terms of this book, it is the object par excellence, or, in Freudian terms, perhaps, the Objet Big A — hidden, mysterious — that Zizek likens to a MacGuffin, setting “the whole story into motion.” [6] In this sense, a Real object doesn’t actually exist: it is only presented to us in a distorted and displaced mode of language, and registered only as effects. Psychoanalysis is interested in where these effects are the aim of the desiring subject, and especially the desiring subject that inflicts
harm. That’s great for psychoanalysis. Super helpful. Architecture’s effects are way less damaging. Its material real are things like wood planks, its pleasures in how the planks line up. 
“The” might therefore be a most unlikely word to choose.

The majority of the essays in this collection are not definitive declarations, not treatises or essais sur architecture, but “love poems,” the secret language of longtime lovers

“The” feels proper, right, and imperious (a good feeling). “The” also feels limiting. It might sound too singular. But “the,” as The Real, as The Building, is also a wide range of significations that have been mediated, that have histories, histories of the intervention, positive or not, of language, of meaning — antagonisms, conflicts, symbolizations, displacements. “The” is not unity itself but, as Sylvia Lavin says accurately, “the effect of unity.” And after forgetting, we would do well to remember that the formulation was the problem all along.

In the 21st century, I suggest that we temporarily try replacing “the” with something more contemporary, like “my” — “my building.” [7] And maybe after a while, if it feels OK, maybe we could say “our” — “our building.” The possessive pronoun should serve to remind us of the status of The Building as what Zizek calls “an object-cause of desire.” A possessive pronoun can serve to transmit a basic feeling of care and ownership, adoration and want. Eventually, we could get back to “the,” as long as we do not forget the feelings that motivate our field. What this collection insists upon is that buildings are not only a medium 
for architectural thinking, but they can and should be the foundation for architectural thinking — that is to say, an architectural thinking that does not attempt to homogenize or systematize in the name of “theoretical coherence.” The majority of the essays in this collection are not definitive declarations, not treatises or essais sur architecture, but “love poems,” the secret language of longtime lovers — what my colleague, Todd Gannon, refers to, through Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, as “the fondling of details.” It’s the bookcase that “escapes function” in Kizis’ analysis of Sou Fujimoto’s library; the pleasant stroll we take through the MUSAC with Stan Allen; the “flirtatious, provisional character” in Scogin Elam’s Wellesley Center; Lathouri’s quasi-historical “unpretentious, elegant but uncertain” description of the Louvre-Lens; “immaculate synthesis”; “profound boredom.” I agree with Enrique Walker’s assessment (via Venturi) that “The Building” is itself a “difficult whole” chock full
 of “difficult wholes” — details, sequences, entryways, one ramp, too much SANAA, never enough Tschumi. This book has an awful lot of Building for the The. If this is remembering, I’ll take it. 

1. As in, “Buildings are based on the arbitrariness to build, Architecture is based on the tyranny of an idea.” Oswald Mathias Ungers, “What Is Architecture? (1964), in Andrew Peckham and Torsten Schmiedeknecht, eds., The Rationalist Reader: Architecture and Rationalism in Western Europe, 1920– 1940/1960–1990 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 318–22.

2. This is recounted very nicely by Peg Rawes in Irigaray for Architects (Thinkers for Architects Series) (New York: Routledge, 2007), xii.

3. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” (1978), trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 49–50.

4. See: Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

5. Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Topoi, Vol. 12, Issue 2 (September 1993): 167–79.

Interested in hearing more from Dora Epstein Jones who, alongside writing, serves as the Executive Director of the A+D Museum in Los Angeles?

Check out our interview with her from Archinect Session One-to-One here:

Screen/Print is an experiment in translation across media, featuring a close-up digital look at printed architectural writing. Divorcing content from the physical page, the series lends a new perspective to nuanced architectural thought.

For this issue, we featured an excerpt from The Building.

Do you run an architectural publication? If you’d like to submit a piece of writing to Screen/Print, please send us a message.