Index Architecture
Edited by Bernard Tschumi and Matthew
Berman
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2003
300pp., 200 illus., 80 col. Paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-262-70095-6
Reviewed by Dennis Dollens
Escola Superior d’Arquitectura
Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, (Barcelona)
exodesic@mac.com
If you’re wondering what Index Architecture
indexes, it’s Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation (GSAP)–if not the most important U.S.
center for architectural theory and advanced design practice in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries, then among
an elite few. As you would expect from a university department that
was a ghetto of historic preservation and Post Modernism before Bernard
Tschumi transformed it into a theoretical powerhouse facing digital
visualization, new materials, and the integrating of digital with
analog production, an entrée into the world of Columbia Speak
is useful, interesting, and potentially enlightening.
If at first the book seems a dictionary of contemporary words used
in architectural chant–it isn’t. As Tschumi states in his
introduction: "Recurring words or phrases became the key terms around
which the writings, interviews, and images selected by the critics
. . . were organized. We did not aim for ideological coherence." As
a guide to design thought via these selected words, Index Architecture
emerges as a filtered and condensed view of the last fifteen years
of architectural perspective as it has infected Columbia in studio
brief quotations, excerpts from other publications, and fragments
of interviews conducted by Matthew Berman with the participating GSAP
faculty: Asympotote (Hani Rashid & Lise Anne Couture), Karen Bausman,
Kathryn Dean, Evan Douglis, Kenneth Frampton, Leslie Gill, Hanrahan
& Meyers, Laurie Hawkinson, Steven Holl, Jeffrey Kipnis, Kolatan/MacDonald,
Greg Lynn, Reinhold Martin, Mary McLeod, Reiser & Umemoto, Bernard
Tschumi, and Mark Wigley. Edited by Tschumi and Berman, the book illustrates
the quoted passages with both student projects and illustrations from
the faculty’s work.
Index Architecture is an idiosyncratic
collection that sometimes connects and sometimes sounds banal (theory
wonk) notes, but mostly it connects. Since I teach in a program called
Genetic Architecture I immediately went for "genetic" and found nothing;
next I looked up "biology" and found an intriguing entry by Karen
Bausman that spoke as much about photography. What became apparent
was that this entry is more a view into a particular theoretic sensibility
that Bausman brought to Columbia than a working literary or scientific
definition of the word. So why is such a definition interesting and
useful? Because, transferred from the context of a studio brief to
an Index Architecture entry, Bausman’s thoughts in relation
to biology, photography, and architecture offer a trace, an idea seed,
that may be extrapolated and redeployed by the reader for contemplation
or inspiration. Bausman’s "biology" is a valuable view into a
moment of didactic expression that only a handful of students were
party to before this publication. And the aggregate of all such entries
yields an insightful tool to underpinnings of contemporary architecture
as well as of Tschumi’s tenure reflected in this particular set
of professor’s word/thought/graphic editorial choices.
After biology, I surfed the book for other entries written by Bausman
to see if I could extrapolate or understand the connectors she has
built as an intellectual platform for her classes and found that two
other entries–organic and time–served
to suggest a network of references, sending up a flag that I should
watch out for other Bausman works beyond the book. From these first
citations I shaped my further browsing of Index Architecture.
I began following the entries of Hawkinson, Lynn, Douglis, and Wigley
for an insight into what could be discerned about the orbits of their
thoughts in relation to architecture, production, teaching, and theory
within the context of their Columbia studios. I was particularly interested
in Lynn’s dealing with "blob" since it obviously has potentially
close links with growth systems (both digital and analog) which the
book then cross-referenced with "aesthetics/appearance; complexity"
in a chain that began directing my reading in the manner of a hypertext.
While I would like to have many other words included in Index Architecture–"algorithm,"
"biomimetics," "monad" to name only three–, that is a reading
into the book of my prejudices. As it exists, Index Architecture
is a penetrating contribution to the debate of what architecture is
today; what constitutes its frontiers and its vocabulary. Even if
you don’t search out biology in architecture or entertain the
idea that architecture is a biologic human extension in more than
material assembly, and even if you don’t minimally acknowledge
architecture’s existence as an entropic, semi-live system (perhaps,
with a heavy conceptual reliance on memes as postulated by Richard
Dawkins), still, this book demonstrates that Index Architecture’s
methods, terms, and discussion are highly infectious.
