Architecture from the Outside : Essays on Virtual and Real Space / Elizabeth Grosz

grosz template 7/26/01 3:44 PM Page 1 Architecture series Architecture from the Outside Essays on Virtual and Real Space Writing Elizabeth Grosz foreword by Peter Eisenman Elizabeth Grosz is the Julian Park Chair in Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Architecture’s best-kept secret is that it is not only knowledge of form, but also a form of knowledge. Elizabeth Grosz’s Architecture from the Outside explores that secret, revealing key contemporary concepts and ideas and opening new routes for spatial research and invention.” —Bernard Tschumi, Dean, Graduate School of Architecture, Architecture from the Outside Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University Architecture from the Outside “It is a credit to the field of architectural theory that it is so Essays on Virtual and Real Space open to its outside—to the creative contributions of other disciplines and approaches. In this illuminating series of essays, Elizabeth Grosz brings to architecture a Deleuzian philosoph- ical perspective that complements her longstanding engage- ments with both the concept of space and the experience of bodies. The result casts a new light on both architecture and philosophy.” —Michael Hardt, Literature Program, Duke University “Architecture’s boundaries are extremely porous, and the flow of ideas between its inside and outside is surprisingly unrestrict- ,!7IA2G2-fhbeje!:t;K;k;K;k ed. Elizabeth Grosz brilliantly exploits this porosity to make a space for reflections and insights. Architecture from the Outside is required reading for any architect who wants his or her work to engage the wide array of challenges confronting us today.” —Ralph Lerner, School of Architecture, Princeton University “With characteristic insight and rigor, Elizabeth Grosz pro- vides a helpful analysis of the relation between philosophy and architecture during the past decade. More important, by rethinking virtuality in relation to the body and materiality, and Grosz vice versa, she effectively moves beyond oppositional modes of analysis, which have created a critical impasse. For Grosz, the virtual opens a future in which ‘the logic of invention’ can The MIT Press f o r Massachusetts Institute of Technology Elizabeth Grosz e operate. To follow her into this emerging space is to discover w o r Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 d that this ‘outsider’ is an ‘insider’ with much to teach.” Peter Eisenman b —Mark C. Taylor, Director of the Center for Technology in http://mitpress.mit.edu y the Arts and Humanities, Williams College 0-262-57149-8 Writing Architecture series for this s cmyk cover image, replace cyan with pms 801, replace magenta with pms 806 Architecture from the Outside Writing Architecture Series A project of the Anyone Corporation Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories Bernard Cache, 1995 Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money Kojin Karatani, 1995 Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture Ignasi de Solà-Morales, 1996 Constructions John Rajchman, 1997 Such Places as Memory John Hejduk, 1998 Welcome to The Hotel Architecture Roger Connah, 1998 A Landscape of Events Paul Virilio, 2000 Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy Luis Fernández-Galiano, 2000 Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space Elizabeth Grosz, 2001 The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Architecture from the Outside Essays on Virtual and Real Space Elizabeth Grosz foreword by Peter Eisenman © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy- ing, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permis- sion in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Janson Text and Franklin Gothic by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grosz, E. A. (Elizabeth A.) Architecture from the outside : essays on virtual and real space / Elizabeth Grosz. p. cm. — (Writing architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-57149-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Architecture—Philosophy. 2. Space (Architecture)—Philoso- phy. I. Title. II. Series. NA2500 .G76 2001 720´.1—dc21 2001018300 Acknowledgments vii Foreword by Peter Eisenman xi Introduction xv Part One Embodied Spaces one Embodying Space: An Interview 3 two Lived Spatiality (The Spaces of Corporeal Desire) 31 three Futures, Cities, Architecture 49 Part Two Transitional Spaces four Architecture from the Outside 57 five Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Real: Some Architectural Reflections 75 six In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture 91 Part Three Future Spaces seven The Future of Space: Toward an Architecture of Invention 109 eight Embodied Utopias: The Time of Architecture 131 nine Architectures of Excess 151 ten The Thing 167 Notes 185 Bibliography 207 Index 215 I am an outsider to the field of architecture. My access to this field was facilitated in a most indirect and unexpected way, for research and writing in this area is some- thing I never expected or directed myself toward with any confi- Acknowledgments dence or self-consciousness. It was only in retrospect, after a period of some eight or nine years, that it became clear to me that architecture and its associated questions of space, spatiality, and inhabitation held too much fascination not to be addressed in more depth. This collection exists largely due to the support and encouragement of Cynthia David- son, to her extended invitations to participate in the Any annual conferences, which she so creatively convened and conceptually formulated over a ten-year period, and to her encouragement in gathering my work as a volume in the Writing Architecture series for the MIT Press. She helped me see that a productive interchange between philosophy and architecture can work for the mutual enrichment, and opening out, of both historically distinct disciplines, and that philosophy needs to think more carefully about architecture as much as architecture is capable of augmentation by philosophy. I would also like to single out John Rajch- man for his long-term vision of the relations between post- modern theory and contemporary architectural reflection, which has inspired and energized me to think about this book and the various papers that comprise it. Our ongoing conversations have always been illuminating, edifying, challenging, and rewarding. I would like to thank Victor Burgin and Beatriz Colomina for taking the risk over a decade ago of asking a complete architectural novice to turn her attentions to the question of space, initiating a process which, unforeseeably and for better or worse, led to the piecemeal production of this book. My thanks also to Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and Anthony Vidler for their benevolence and welcoming tolerance of the outsider that philosophers tend to be, especially to architectural practice and writing. The support of institutions during the writing of papers and books is crucial and also deserves acknowledg- ment. I would like to thank the Critical Theory and Cultural Studies Program at Monash University, Mel- bourne, Australia, where I worked from 1992 until 1998, for the time and inspiration they provided me to write the majority of the papers gathered here. I would like to ac- knowledge the support and encouragement provided me for this truly hybrid and interdisciplinary project by the two interdisciplinary places I have worked since leaving Monash—the Critical Theory Program at the University of California, Irvine, and the Comparative Literature De- partment at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I would especially like to thank the various students of architecture and the visual arts to whom I presented many of these papers before they were ready for publication. One’s texts are only ever as good, if one is lucky, as one’s audi- ence, and I have been privileged to be involved with a number of exciting and challenging audiences and inter- locutors to whom I owe thanks for helping me to sharpen these papers in the process of rewriting them for this book. All the papers have been modified, changed, and in some cases updated, although they are presented here in the order in which they were written, with no attempt to remove disagreements and points of uneasiness between papers and no attempt to remove the transformation within my arguments as they developed over many years. viii – ix Acknowledgments Without a large network of friends—colleagues and critics—one risks the kind of confrontation with limits and frustrations that may drive a would-be author to de- spair and even madness at the vastness, impossibility, and presumptuousness of the process of writing, let alone writing in order to invite and create the new. Here Gai Stern, Philipa Rothfield, Jacqueline Reid, and Judith Allen de- serve my continuing gratitude for their humor, friendship, and loyalty. Pheng Cheah, as always, has provided intelli- gence and insight into my work. Nicole Fermon not only has been an ongoing source of insight and inspiration but has also provided the encouragement and strength I needed to understand that struggle—political and con- ceptual, with oneself and with others—is the condition of everything worthwhile, and that courage is necessary to think, to write, and especially to think and write as an outsider—a position that makes one especially vulnerable to criticism, but also fresh and new to the inside. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my par- ents, Imre and Eva Gross. In an important essay published in 1979, the architectural histo- rian Manfredo Tafuri distin- guished between two types of history. The first acknowledged the epistemological rupture that was inherent in industrial civiliza- Foreword tion, while the other, utopian theory, he saw as hidden in the functionalism of Sigfried Giedion and the anticlassicism of Bruno Zevi.

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