by Jon Lackman | 22 October 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In the summer 2008 issue of Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Pierre Chabard reviews Felicity D. Scott’s Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Politics after Modernism:
Architecture or Techno-Utopia, presented as an “alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture,” could appear at first glance to be a pure product of the powerful university machine of the U.S. east coast … Of Australian origin, [Scott] graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and in 2001 defended her thesis in the doctoral program of Princeton University’s architecture department. Founded by [Anthony] Vidler in the early 1980s and directed today by [Beatriz] Colomina, this doctoral program – where Alan Colquhoun, Mark Wigley, Georges Teyssot, and Alexandra Ponte, among others, teach or have taught – constitutes one of the most intense American centers of historical research into twentieth-century architecture – history that is enthusiastically cross-cutting, culturalist, and nourished by Kritische Theorie and French Theory.
However, with her already rich work, this young and brilliant historian, who has been teaching at Columbia since 2007, resolutely contradicts any prejudices one could harbor in light of such a pedigree. Her originality permits her to escape the intellectual comfort (and even conformism) that is sometimes the fruit of this scientific doxa, to instead draw from its better half …
Scott has made the choice to break with the readings that reduce this period [c. 1970] to a dialectic between modernisms and postmodernisms … Scott intends to reveals other types of cleavage, other lines of fracture, in particular between architecture and Techno-Utopia … she opposes the nostalgic proponents for the discipline’s autonomy with those optimistically favoring its dissolving into new mechanistic regimes …
[The book] systematically integrates a parameter often absent from architectural histories – the inscription of architects in their social, cultural and political contexts. Closer to cultural studies (and sometimes abusing the prefix “post” – “postrevolutionary,” “postsemantic,” “postnational,” “postutopian,” “postcritical,” “postpolitical,” “postdisciplinary,” etc.) than the marxist readings of the previous generation, this interest in context can also be found at the heart of Grey Room, the journal … that Scott co-founded in 2000 and codirects … such an approach undeniably enriches, nuances and renews the historical comprehension of the architectural facts of this period.
