Installation view of Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech. Photograph by Justin Knight, courtesy of Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech, the inaugural exhibition of the Drucker Design Gallery at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, prompted visitors to “read” the works on display as blank pages might be read.

In an essay on artworks that take the form of blank pages, the media theorist Craig Dworkin catalogs many different ways artists have done something significant while ostensibly doing almost nothing. For example, in the movie Orpheus, a Parisian poet published a book of poetry consisting of nothing but blank pages, titled Nudisme. What this book did in the context of the movie’s fictional poetry scene was very different from a similar blank book, also titled Nudisme and styled in a similar way, that was recently on sale in fashionable Brooklyn shops. Another of Dworkin’s examples, a poet bought 1,500 reams of blank paper and stamped his name on the cover, aiming to sell them as poetry. The patron who funded the project threw “the wretched little thing” into the garbage (except for three reams, which she saved for posterity); but, only after carrying out the project at great expense and thereby proving that she was hip enough to “rise to the challenge.” Another artist stared at a blank sheet of paper for 1,000 hours and put it up in a gallery with a label attesting to the fact. And yet, another had the brilliant idea of accomplishing a similar feat by staring at 1,000 sheets for one hour. None of these blank pages contained definite statements—there is little or nothing the artists were saying directly. But, they nonetheless provoked their “readers” in specific ways within their specific situations.

The title of the recent Harvard exhibition, Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech, raises some questions when taken literally: Are these buildings eventually going to talk? Maybe the architects are orators and architecture is a way of warming up the vocal cords? The “before speech” qualifier, however, begins to make sense once the show has been situated within the history of architecture theory. Architecture theory as we know it today in North America began when the writing of Manfredo Tafuri was imported en masse to schools in the Northeast around 1980. The keyword of early conferences on the topic was “ideology,” and architecture was viewed as “pure ideology [...] that is, as a reflection of dominant class interests," as Joan Ockman put it in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology. For these theorists, architecture played “a negative social role: it becomes an instrument of the existing power structure.” Of particular interest was how architecture functions as part of the system of cultural reproduction (through the “ideological state apparatus,” in Althusserian terms). In this view, architecture is a means by which society tells itself stories about how the world works. Theory thus placed architecture alongside other cultural forms such as literature and advertising. Like these other fields, it was thought best to approach architecture using the methods of semiological analysis descended from Ferdinand de Saussure to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In this methodology, meaning is said to be “constructed” by the complex apparatus of culture, and one task of a critical architect or theorist is to “deconstruct” architecture to understand and intervene in the forces at work.

To tie this short and admittedly one-dimensional history of theory to the Harvard exhibition, we could summarize by saying that architecture theory as we know it has passed through and out the other side of the apparatus of close reading. So it is no surprise that an exhibition curated by a partisan of critical architecture theory—K. Michael Hays (his co-curator was Andrew Holder (more on him later))—has “speech” in its title. What is surprising is that speech is not analyzed but immediately set aside, and that we are shunted into a pre-linguistic realm in which the raw linguistic input of the machinery of theory would seem to be denied.

The notion of architecture 'before speech' does not necessarily imply a focus on some pre-linguistic realm

This is where complications arise in the premise of the show. The notion of architecture “before speech” does not necessarily imply a focus on some pre-linguistic realm: logically, one could understand a language and even read and write with it while refraining from actually speaking. But the show does indeed go out of its way to set aside the realm of language. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a long wall with one or two hundred loosely arranged images of projects by 71 firms with a menagerie of models milling about in front of it. Everything has a label, but they are tiny, as if they wanted to disappear. Reinforcing the dominance of visuality, images and models are presented in isolation—that is, projects cannot be read as a whole even if, say, a plan, a rendering, and model are all present somewhere in the mix. A few titles—“labyrinths,” “booleans,” and so on—are printed on boards in an exceedingly spindly font and leaned sideways against the wall, giving a very minimal textual framing to the loosely organized material.

Fitting the theme of non-textuality, most of the works on display seem to operate through a combination of straightforward simplicity and transcendental obscurity. Some projects play with metaphor and symbolism—a few have pitched roofs and exude “houseness;” one is a “sandwich”—but it all seems to be lighthearted rather than seriously semiotic like postmodernist architecture was, or suffused with dread like deconstruction. In any case, the presentation of the work makes it impossible to dig deeply into linguistic games. Interpretation is denied. One gets the sense that most of the architects are dealing in broad cultural connotations rather than specific meanings. A shade called “millennial pink” that shows up repeatedly, for example, resonates with James Turrell’s recent Guggenheim show and Drake’s Hotline Bling music video. In other works, formal interest and craft overshadow the anemic symbolism, as when a house shape is carved, sliced, and transformed in intricate and unexpected ways. The surprising range of formal moves performed on such simple base material exhausts the verbs available; one is not prompted to examine the process but to revel in the sheer formal virtuosity. In fact, the less we are able to pinpoint meaning and intentions, the more compelling the work becomes.

Observers of architecture culture will have noticed that this realm has been in vogue for some time now, often associated with terms like “affect” and “atmosphere.” This realm has been popular across the humanities, from cultural studies and media theory, to geography. In architecture, Jason Payne and Sylvia Lavin (who were both Holder's professors at UCLA) have been creating, promoting, and theorizing work in this area for well over a decade now. The important twist to notice here is that the writing style of many essays in this theoretical realm makes them come across as anti-theoretical. Exemplifying this, Dworkin’s essay on blank pages juxtaposes artworks and effects rather than trying to explain what caused what. It reads predominantly as a description rather than a critical analysis or explanation. In a ruthless letter that Theodore Adorno wrote to his friend Walter Benjamin, Adorno noted how Benjamin trafficked in this style: “the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.” Adorno’s prescription is key: “Only theory could break this spell.”

To understand why Benjamin’s error of “the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts” keeps being repeated, we should first of all note that breaking the spell of things at the crossroads of magic and positivism is not always desirable. Adorno himself wrote in a way that looped around an unresolved tension—the irreducible “nonidentity” of things, which “can never be grasped fully or reconciled with us," as Jane Bennett put it. Adorno did not practice heartless disenchantment. Rather, he pinpointed and elaborated an impasse that exists between theory and non-theory, between two sensibilities pulling in opposite directions (“the critical” and “the affirmative” might be good terms for them). The significance of Inscriptions is that its curators—one of whom, Hays, is a longtime partisan of critical theory—have recognized that this impasse is entirely of our own construction, and they offer a route around it.

It is fitting that the event Hays identifies as the pivotal moment in the genealogy of the exhibition is a moment of the failure of speech that both critical theorists and affirmative / affective / atmospheric theorists would agree is crucial. The event in question was recounted by the artist Tony Smith in a now-famous interview of 1966. It’s a great story, worth reproducing here:

When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ‘50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.

Hays’ interpretation is also worth watching. He devotes more than ten minutes to describing how Smith presents “a theory of inscription, though he doesn’t use the word.” Hays unpacks Smith’s observation primarily through another quote from Derrida, who used the word “inscription” theoretically for this first time circa 1966. Derrida did so in the context of yet another analysis of yet another quote, this one from Antonin Artaud, who described “a painful experience he always has in creative writing: the moment where you feel you are entirely trained and prepared and experienced [...] but you have nothing to say.” This “combination of a high level of skill and drawing a blank” is, for Derrida and for Hays, “the very condition from which all artistic experience comes.” Derrida explains that there is no such thing as pure creative invention—a substrate of materialization precedes “pure potentiality.” In other words, just as Smith says that new artistic concepts will build upon prior raw experience, Hays says that architectural “speech” follows material investigation. The anteriority of materiality is both conceptual and historical: artists and architects play around with matter, so to speak, before they find the words for what they are doing; a culture is confronted with new objects as raw facticity before it assimilates them. The exhibition thus offers a map of a material reality that has not yet been assimilated into socio-cultural categories.

Hays' theoretical apparatus affords prominent places to Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul de Man alongside Derrida. All this may be familiar to you if you have gone through the North American university system in the past few decades: what has been said above regarding “inscription” is implicit in the field of cultural studies and most humanities curricula. Careful theoretical attention to the experiences that theory has missed is also, famously, at the heart of Rosalind Krauss’ essay on sculpture in the expanded field—a precedent in theory that the curators update and apply to contemporary architecture. For Krauss, a work of art was only a “sculpture” if it adhered to certain medium-specific properties (it had to be up on pedestal, experienced in the round, and so on; this was standard fare in “medium specificity” theory of the era, following the writing of the art critic Clement Greenberg). Negating one or more of these medium-specific properties created a matrix or “expanded field” of related mediums. In this way, Krauss brilliantly identified the structural coherence behind the period’s fertile but apparently disorganized artistic production. The curators of Inscriptions have the same intention: the exhibition text states that the show “offers a theory of the structural relationships that bind and organize even the apparent delirium of the contemporary field.” They even offer a Krauss-inspired Greimas Square of the expanded field of “originals” and the types of “inscriptions” that structure it.

If artists had identified the need to work with un-theorized experiences in the 1960s, then why is the Harvard exhibition being staged now?

If artists had identified the need to work with un-theorized experiences in the 1960s—and if they were in fact working extensively with them—then why is the Harvard exhibition being staged now? A crucial point is that the curators are not making an argument myopically focused on the present. With the oldest project in the exhibition dating to 1983—not long after Krauss’ 1979 essay—the show seems to be suggesting an unbroken chain linking us to the work of the `60s. This claim of continuity is important. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the consensus in the field today is that architecture is rudderless, with no agreed upon theory, no style, and no common sense of purpose. In the context of this disciplinary fog and the existential funk it causes, the curators’ narrative of a continuous exploration spanning fifty years, perhaps even with growing intensity and focus in the present, is certainly welcome. Inscriptions benevolently includes exemplars of former styles alongside current stars: Preston Scott Cohen and Mack Scogin are rescued from the label of “deconstruction,” and the curators refrain from casting the shade of “postmodernism” over current work that might deserve it. Past and present projects are arrayed equally in a coherent expanded field.

The show’s benevolence also extends to formerly-demonized theories. The curators dwell more with experience than others have been comfortable doing, apparently shrugging off its connotations of phenomenology. It is worth emphasizing how unusual this is coming from a critical theorist: when Adorno warned against “the theological motif of calling things by their names,” he was warning against ideology naturalized as experience. Theory would break the spell by dissecting experience and exposing its origins in the structure of social relations. Krauss’ analysis was appropriately critical in this regard: she focused not on experience but on the structural permutations of the properties of artworks. Krauss was thus closer to her old-fashioned structuralist predecessor, Greenberg, than she was to the rising tide of postmodernism in philosophy and theory. So it is a bold move for the curators to present experiences that have been “mapped out but not socially recognized,” as Smith put it. Maybe we are past the point when phenomenology and postmodernism are dangers to steer clear of, or maybe current upheavals (resurgent nationalisms, addictions to social media, etc.) are presenting enough new “experiences” that we need to recognize before we can even begin to process them. Whatever the impetus, the curators’ theoretical open-mindedness is refreshing.

The exhibition is not, however, about experience, but creation. The theme of foregrounding raw experience has its counterpart in raw making. The exhibition text notes how:

certain unprecedented and eidetic images strike us as uncannily resonant and contemporary, yet, at the same time, archaic and out of reach. Digitally generated labyrinths, Booleans, or stochastic patterns in plan and elevation take on the mystery of glyphs without a code of translation. They must be understood as inscriptions anterior to any meaning, as material potentiality anterior to any phenomena.

(An aside: it is possible to detect in Hays’ insistence that “materialization has to happen before coding” a theoretical incursion not only into the realm of affect but also into the territory of contemporary computational practices.) Productive as it is, the notion of pre-linguistic inscription threatens to throw an irreconcilable monkey wrench into the gears of theory. Returning to the essay on blank pages cited at the beginning of this review, Dworkin perceptively notes that if the artistic act is reduced to a broadly-defined notion of inscription – so broad that any artistic intention towards a blank page counts as an effort of making a “mark” – it quickly becomes clear that anything can be inscribed in countless ways, and thus that anything can be a medium with countless properties. But the idea of an expanded field of medium-specific properties loses its structuring power when expanded to anything and everything. Dworkin’s solution to this formalist conundrum is the same as the curators’: they begin to move away from Krauss’s synchronic structuralism by bringing in history. Dworkin asks rhetorically: “was the paper you are holding already a medium before it was brought together with the ink?” And the curators answer: “once a transcendental original project is actualized (and only then), it appears that it was always already there, just waiting to be put to use.” In short, we should not take the expanded field of Inscriptions as an ahistorical logical combinatorics (a bit of structuralism several decades late), but as a map of our current relationship to our disciplinary history.

It must be noted, however, that the decision to present 35 years of work as a relatively unstructured field of images tends to suggest simultaneity, and it tends to empty out the underlying disciplinary history. In fact, some of the projects in the exhibition provide the historical context for others. Preston Scott Cohen’s exquisite geometrical drawings provide the hinge between deconstruction and the GSD’s current geometrical work; Mack Scogin’s architectural creatures are likewise a whimsical bridge between the deep poetics of John Hejduk and current formal lightheartedness. Both of these figures have taught for a long time in the very building in which the exhibition was housed, and they may well have advised some of the thesis projects that evolved into the other work in the exhibition. It becomes difficult to talk about pre-linguistic “inscriptions” and “originals” when the work is clearly evidence of a highly-sophisticated negotiation with precedents as well as the whole discursive apparatus employed in the education of architects. As a counter-balance to synchronicity, it would have been nice to have seen genealogical maps like those produced for the recent show on Japanese architects at MoMA.

Inscriptions should be understood as a polemic against the intellectual blackmail that has played an outsized role in architecture culture for too long – the forced choice between being critical and having fun

The cleverest move of the exhibition was in the very notion of architecture “before speech.” Speech was evoked, then set aside. This is key. If we are to read the work in Inscriptions as pre-verbal and perhaps pre-critical and pre-political, the implication is that the next step is to say something and to engage in a definite way. The show thus makes room for new experiences and new voices while subtly warning against the temptation to refuse to say anything. To mount a soapbox for a moment, I would suggest that analysis never defeats ideology (as critical theorists might hope), and that sub-cultural ideals can (and should) stand the harsh light of mainstream civil discourse, which is preferable, especially in our current situation, to reveling in isolated experiential worlds. To read, finally, into the implicit generational framing of the show, and Andrew Holder’s specific contribution as a curator, Inscriptions should be understood as a polemic against the intellectual blackmail that has played an outsized role in architecture culture for too long – the forced choice between being critical and having fun. This is a false opposition. Younger architects today are both intellectually serious and oriented towards real issues and real building projects. They do not fit comfortably in the “critical versus pragmatic” schema—which is a “shitty paradigm,” to coin a phrase following Roland Barthes in The Neutral (credit goes to Phillip Denny). Inscriptions recognizes this, and it suggests that we spend more time looking at the intricacies of the clearly coherent body of work it puts on display before we shoehorn everything—verbally—into its place.