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I started working on architects at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies of Princeton University in the spring of 1980. I have incurred many debts in writing this book. This one suggests movement and a progression of events rather than driving for finality, it looks forward to a needed open-endedness.ĭebate would be welcome on what architects can control and what is beyond our control that is, What are the particular and specific responsi. Architectural books are, too often, the end of the affair. This book lays the foundation for a new beginning, a new debate. Much of architectural discourse and criticism today resembles missiles fired randomly in all directions. It is only in the polemics of current discourse that architecture becomes esoteric and isolated. Architects are fortunate to be in a profession that is inherently not isolated, not pure or narcissistic, one that has to be integrated into the surrounding society and culture to exist. There are, indeed, responsibilities that are particularly architectural, but those responsibilities are deeply implanted in our society and culture. Architectural history and much of the discourse about architecture have become a limiting diversion, a presetting of our perceptions and expectations.Īrchitecture as it is practiced, taught, and talked about generally assumes an autonomy that is in conflict with the notion of architecture as a service profession, integral to the society and culture, embedded in everyday life. Similarly, current architectural criticism tends to be preoccupied with the what, ignoring settings, focusing on fragments and ornaments-shells of ideas-and failing to explain in any useful way how things came to be as they are. Architectural history, much of it growing from the traditions of German art history, has been preoccupied with the what of events and-since events in architecture are visible-with what things look like, often with little regard to intentions, foreground, or background, temporal or physical. History, good history, informs us about what happened but also about why, in all its complexity. We need to revisit and to understand the history of these transformations of architecture. In this century we have seen post-World War I European "modern" architecture, an architecture of strong social purpose and commitment, transformed, on its arrival in this country, to an architecture of form and style and, after World War II, to a worldwide means of aggressive development. This study, revealing as it does the extraordinary changes in the inner and outer forces central to the production of architecture, should encourage genuine dialogue and debate about possible futures, of perhaps different "architectures." Such a debate cannot assume a tabula rasa.
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Will require a full understanding of the environment in which architects work as well as an understanding of our habits of discourse, of the ways architects perceive the world and deal with it. To begin again, to move forward responsibly, Dealing with these largely external changes by traditional responses or with traditional perceptions and ideas can hardly work. Even such autonomy as does exist is being eroded by complexities and conflicts arriving from new quarters. No architect can realistically believe in anything approaching complete autonomy. In Behind the Postmodern Facade Magali Sarfatti Larson examines both the outer complexities and the inner struggles of architecture nothing so complete or so penetrating has been undertaken before. Fragmentary explanations exist, but they assume that each element in the complex task is an autonomous unit, separate and uncontaminated. But architects rarely have time to study the nature or causes of that complexity. No architect needs to be told that the process of producing architecture is complex. That sea change in architecture as object and architecture as process is addressed with authority and insight in this book. The changes in the environment in which architects work (and worked for the better part of this century) have transformed both what architects do and how they do it, in everything from architecture as idea to architecture as built fact. These growing complexities in the production of architecture constitute a dramatic shift that many either failed to notice or became resigned to. In the last decade or two, contradictions and conflicts have arisen between what we architects conceive as our goals and purposes and what we accept from project developers as their goals. Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1993 1993. Preferred Citation: Larson, Magali Sarfatti.