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.

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.

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