Informal Architectures

by Anthony Kiendl
Black Dog Publishing, London, 2008

240 pp., illus. 180 b/w $ col. Trade, £35.00 ISBN: 978-1-906155-33-9.

Reviewed by Chris Speed
School of Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, Lauriston Place

edinburgh/Scotland/c.speed@eca.ac.uk



Informal Architecture is a broad range of essays, interviews and artists’ works that describe contemporary vocabularies and strategies for both interpreting spatial culture, but also responding to it. The book openly locates itself in a ‘post-9/11’ context, and subsequently the texts examine space and place through the use of ‘social, philosophical, political and poetic’ frameworks. The selection is substantial with no less that 27 articles to contend with, making it a challenging task to make sense of its rubric. Rather refreshingly Kiendl’s doesn’t present architecture in crisis, which is a common tactic in many architectural texts, but identifies its inertia and inability to escape modernity and uses the work of theorists to describe this, and artists to offer methods for working with it. Beyond his articulate introduction, Kiendl requires us to piece together how art and architectural practices can be re-considered as sensitive and yet optimistic in interfacing with contemporary place. He provides is with three primary categories with which to understand architectures contemporary disposition; Space / Perception, Consumption / Ruin, and Monument / Ephemerality, and within which he organises the range of works.

Space / Perception, the first of the tri-lectic lenses (to borrow from Lefebvre), uses the spectator and user of architecture to reflect upon capitalisms impact upon the built environment. Addressing the political, economic and social circumstances that have transformed our experience of streets over the last twenty years, the authors depict how representational spaces have extended architectures affects far beyond that of the façade. There is a delicate complexity in what is being described here, as the reader absorbs Keiller’s analysis of the gentrification of the city through caf és and loft living, and compares it to Miller’s provocative proposals to obfuscate billboards from the pedestrians’ experience of the street.

Consumption / Ruin reminds us that contexts that are larger than that of buildings themselves, and that architectures purpose is limited to the cultural and social constraints that surround it. This category describes how contingent architecture is according to the time and place that it is used and viewed. How in fact, the bricks and mortar that initially provided shelter are superceded by the contextual tensions within which they are placed. Expressed through a persistent reference to destruction rather than construction, the texts puncture any last remaining right to permanence that architects should feel toward buildings. Particularly effective is Weizman’s essay that describes the problems of re-inhabiting the de-colonised spaces of the Gaza Strip, and equally affective is Antick’s analysis of holocaust tourism as places such as Auschwitz are developed for different audiences.

The last category, Monument / Ephemerality returns the reader to types of architectural art and design practice that negotiate the sensitive nature of environments that the previous sections have developed. The texts acknowledge how buildings and structures play a significant part in shaping the contracts between institutions and individuals, governments and societies. Architecture is both exposed as a political device and at the same time liberated through the examples of individuals who use it to express their own form of territory. The highly personal nature of many of these territorial activities is exemplified through McKeough’s eating of a museums wall, Phillip’s critical account of Francis Alÿs’ piece ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’, and Cowans discussion on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established outside Parliament House in Canberra.

Kiendl’s organisation of the texts present a range of circumstances through which architecture can be understood to be intrinsically linked without specific reference to the process of designing buildings. Easy enough you might say, but what is refreshing here is the composition of theory and reflection, alongside practice and intervention, so as to provide the term architecture with as much contingency as possible, and still retain integrity to creative processes that contribute to spatial culture. What Kiendl achieves through the book is serious attempt to straddle art and architecture with a theoretical integrity that supports and embraces creative practice. The scale of the project will tempt readers to dip into articles, which will weaken the opportunity to understand Kiendl’s proposition. What should be appreciated is the delicacy of his composition in order to support a critical and sophisticated approach to contemporary architecture.