Revisiting the debate around autonomy in architecture: A genealogy

Abstract

This paper aims to trace a genealogy of the debate around autonomy by bringing to light the main episodes that fashioned it from the moment of crisis of the belief that a homogeneous Zeitgeist dispersed throughout civilization is sufficient for understanding the evolution of architectural knowledge until nowadays. By diagnosing the succession of encounters and conflicts that shaped this debate the different forms of societal concerns within the discipline of architecture will be revealed. The reductionist conception of urban complexity through its formal visualization and juxtaposition of its structures that the formalistic contextualism of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter suggests in Collage City will be problematized here for neglecting the importance of urban politics and the social relevance of architecture and urban planning. Their system of autonomous grid and heterogeneous fragments will be criticized for not paying attention to any form of history that lies outside of architecture. Stuart Cohen underscores the significance of strategies that deal with physical, cultural, and architectural inputs to the process of design, stressing the relativity of value judgment and interrelating notions coming from opposed architectural tendencies, such as inclusivism and exclusivism, under the theoretical construct of contextualism. K. Michael Hays is interested in the oppositions between autonomization and historicization, as well as the evolution of their pas de deux. Stanford Anderson tries to discern how the submersion in the material conditions characterizing one's time could be avoided, as well as how it could be possible to address social issues without adopting a formally driven approach. Peter Eisenman questions whether an architectural autonomy is already social, or whether autonomy can be teased out from the social. He poses the following questions: is there a core of normative conditions, interior to architectural discipline, regarding type and disciplinal historicity that is inevitably activated via any act belonging to architectural design practice? Are there concepts that can escape their determination by this core of normative condition, and are not bound by history or historical context? This trajectory aims at revealing the sequence of controversies around distinctions such as culture/form, context/content, history/becoming, fiction/reality, construction of meaning/instrumentalist functionalism, internalism/externalism in order to propose a research model that overcomes the dichotomies of the Hegelian dialectic. The aspiration of this gesture is to respond to the interrogation of the conditions of possibility to get a distance from the preconceptions of types, the symbolic identification that accompany them and the a priori meanings attached to them.