Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s

430 Pages·2019·35.582 MB·English

by  Craig Buckley

GRAPHIC ASSEMBLY
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GRAPHIC
ASSEMBLY
Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s
CRAIG BUCKLEY
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Every effort was made to obtain permission to Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University
reproduce material in this book. If any proper of Minnesota
acknowledgment has not been included here, we
encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
This publication is made possible in part from the Barr transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book was published with the assistance of the Published by the University of Minnesota Press
Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
Portions of the Introduction and chapter 2 were http://www.upress.umn.edu
previously published in a different form in Grey Room,
no. 73 (Fall 2018). Portions of chapter 3 were previously Printed in the United States of America on acid- free
published in a different form in “From Absolute to paper
Everything: Taking Possession in ‘Alles ist Architektur,’ ”
Grey Room, no. 28 (Summer 2007): 108– 22. Portions of The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity
chapter 5 were previously published in a different form educator and employer.
in “Superstudio’s Aberrant Images,” in and Materials,
Money, and Crisis, ed. Alexander Scrimgeour, Richard 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Birkett, and Sam Lewitt (Vienna: MuMOK, 2014).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckley, Craig, author.
Graphic assembly : montage, media, and experimental architecture in the 1960s/ Craig Buckley.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022887 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0161-5 (hc/j : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Europe—History—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Europe—History—20th century. | Montage.
Classification: LCC NA958 .B83 2019 | DDC 720.94/0904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022887
CONTENTS
Introduction: Envisioning Assembly 1
1 Clipping: The Promiscuous Attachments of Reyner Banham 33
2 The Infamous Plug: Archigram’s Screen Architecture 73
3 Everything Is Architecture: Hans Hollein’s Media Assemblages 125
4 Disassembling Paris: Utopie circa 1968 185
5 Scenarios and Counterscenarios: Superstudio’s Mediascapes 241
Epilogue: Image as Assemblage 291
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 305
Index 371
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INTRODUCTION
Envisioning Assembly
Now that printing has ceased to constitute the major basis for teaching and
learning and is no longer the dominant technological form of our world, there
is much more printing than ever before.
— Marshall McLuhan, “Electronics and the
Changing Role of Print”
In 1972 a young architect looked back on his experience of the 1960s. What
he recalled was the importance of printed images. For an emerging genera-
tion, he noted, the ability to affect architectural culture depended less on the
realization of buildings than on a capacity to mobilize particular media.
Almost simultaneously at various places in the world, be it Japan,
England, or Austria, this discussion was started. It had to be pro-
voked. To do this, to give this discussion the broadest possible base,
certain means and media were developed— “independently,” but
rather similar. I want to label them evocative images. Plug- in cities
with cranes hovering, walking cities, cities of giant trusses between
giant Doric columns, an aircraft- carrier- city in a landscape.1
The architect was Hans Hollein, and the images to which he alluded have
since become well known. They included his own Aircraft Carrier City in a
Landscape (1964), Arata Isozaki’s Future City (Incubation Process) (1962),
and Ron Herron’s A Walking City (1964). Emerging from Vienna, Tokyo,
and London, the images cited by Hollein testify to the formation of a trans-
national network linking a younger generation of architects during the 1960s.
There was nothing inherently new about such global relationships. Since the
1
FIGURE I.1. Hans
Hollein, Aircraft Carrier
City in a Landscape,
1964. Project
perspective. Cut-a nd-
pasted reproduction
on four- part
photograph mounted
on board, 8½ × 39⅜
inches. Philip Johnson
Fund. Copyright Hans
Hollein; digital image
copyright The Museum
of Modern Art.
Licensed by SCALA /
Art Resource, NY.
later nineteenth century, the expanded circulation of photographic images
printed in magazines and books had fostered an increasing awareness of the
contemporaneity of architectural developments in distant places. Yet the
postwar period witnessed a transformation, at once in the media techniques
used by architects and in the characteristics of such print- based networks.
The images cited by Hollein did not aim to illustrate an approach or reinforce
an argument but to evoke: to call up an emotion or bring a feeling into being.
Looking at these works together reveals that this evocative capacity rested on
something particular: Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape, Isozaki’s
Future City, and Herron’s Walking City were all photomontages.
The present volume asks why such a conceptual technique became so
pervasive in postwar architectural culture and examines its pivotal role in
forging the international network of experimental architectural practice that
emerged during the long 1960s. Each of the photomontages cited by Hollein
extracted fragments of drawings or photographs, which were transposed and
recombined to form an alien landscape. Herron’s initial drawings of Walking
City feature colossal architectural vehicles inspired by the decaying Shivering
Sands antiaircraft forts in the Thames estuary, which appeared regularly in
British newspapers reporting on the pirate radio station that began broad-
casting from these platforms that spring.2 Herron decided to publish them in
photomontage form, inserting his lumbering vehicles into a grainy enlarge-
ment of Lower Manhattan, a new city confronting an old one after a trans-
2
INTRODUCTION
atlantic crossing. Isozaki’s Future City repurposed fragments of the architect’s
joint- core drawings— a trabeated urban building system the architect had
developed in the office of Kenzō Tange. This superstructure was designed to
contend with the massive postwar growth of Tokyo, yet in the photom ontage
it was conjoined with the ruins of a Doric temple, which looms gloomily
above a multilane highway and pedestrian bridges.3 Hollein’s Aircraft Car-
rier transplanted the USS Forrestal—t he first of a new class of postwar su-
percarriers developed for jet aircraft—f rom the high seas to the rolling hills
of Austria’s rural Bürgenland. The landscape was part of a little- developed
hinterland along the border of Hungary that had become a militarized zone
along the metaphorical “iron curtain” dividing Cold War Europe. Empha-
sizing abrupt displacements and stark manipulations of scale, such paper
giants highlighted collisions between old and new, mobility and stasis. The
incongruous conjunctions found in such photomontages evoked alienation,
collapse, and spatial dislocation, rather than the assurance of new begin-
nings or the expansive confidence in technology associated with emerging
concepts of megastructure in architectural culture. The war machines, ruins,
and robots populating these composite landscapes were indices of a brewing
cultural and political volatility, ambiguous reminders of the rapid transfor-
mations associated with the postwar consumer economy, the unprecedented
mobility of people and information, and anxieties about planetary destruc-
tion at the height of the Cold War.
3
INTRODUCTION