Clark Fagot and Harold Pashler, “Repetition Blindness: Perception or Memory Failure?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance vol. 21, no 2. (April 1995): 275–292.
György Kepes, Language of Vision (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995), 53.
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 129.
Pierre von Meiss, Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place, trans. Pierre von Meiss (New York: Routledge, 1990), 32.
Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Richard Schonfield (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 13.
“Harmony consists of a beautiful appearance and harmonious effect … achieved when the height of the elements of a building are suitable to their breadth, and their breadth to their length, and in a word, when all the elements match its modular [symmetrical] system.” Ibid., 14.
Semper championed “repose and harmony in colors (as well as in spatial combinations).” Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 135.
Berlage quotes the historian Johannes H. Leliman’s lectures on Greek building: “Its exalted repose finds form in stone; all proportions of dimension and mass are well balanced … Perfect harmony makes all parts resonate in powerful chords.” Hendrik Petrus Berlage, “Some Reflections on Classical Architecture” [1908], trans. Wim de Wit, Thoughts on Style: 1886–1909 (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publications, 1996), 270.
“The aim of all artistic creation, in [Berlage’s mind], was the achievement of repose, and thus of style, the ultimate aesthetic quality.” Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 143.
“Harmony sometimes (often) exists: eurhythmia. The eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms … keeps them in metastable equilibrium.” Henri Lefebvre, Elements of Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction to the Understanding of Rhythms, in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum, 2004), 20.
Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture, or the Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations, trans. David Britt (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publications, 1992), 89–90.
“We return to symmetry in space. Take a band ornament where the individual section repeated again and again is of length a and sling it around a circular cylinder, the circumference of which is an integral multiple of a, for instance 25a. You then obtain a pattern which is carried over into itself through the rotation around the cylinder axis by α = 360°/25 and its repetitions. The twenty-fifth iteration is the rotation by 360°, or the identity. We thus get a finite group of rotations of order 25, i.e. one consisting of 25 operations. The cylinder may be replaced by any surface of cylindrical symmetry.” Hermann Weyl, Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 53–54.
Ibid., 51.
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 430.
Ibid., 443.
Ibid., 436.
Wolf von Eckardt, Eric Mendelsohn (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960), 14.
Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 165–289.
“Modern industrial plants condense within themselves … all the most characteristic and potential features of the new life. [Here is
Ibid., 92.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
“The history of styles, as it has been understood until recent times, is simply the history of the evolution of architectural form. Compositional methods … have remained in the background. Nevertheless, by discerning the peculiarity of compositional rules, one also fully understands style … Together with the history of architectural forms, it is possible to establish a parallel history of compositional methods, which above all analyzes the driving force behind such methods: rhythm, in all its diverse manifestations.” Moisei Ginzburg, Ritm v arkhitekture (Moscow: 1923), 71. A translation of the Russian: “История стилей, как она понималась до последнего времени, —есть лишь история эволюции архитектурной формы. Композиционные методы…оставались на заднем плане. Однако и здесь разгадать своеобразие этих композиционных законов значит понять вполне стиль … Наряду с историей архитектурных форм возможна и параллельная история композиционных методов, анализирующая в первую очередь двигательную силу этих методов: ритм, во всем разнообразии его проявления.”
A translation of the Russian: “Лента жилых ячеек … в виде длинного однообразного объема с ритмически повторяющимися элементами.”
Sigfried Giedion, “Aesthetics and the Human Habitat,” in Architecture and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 93.
Ibid., 95.
Giedion flirts with atavism here, but restrains himself: “The attitude of contemporary architecture toward other civilizations is a humble one … Often shantytowns contain within themselves vestiges of the last balanced civilization—the last civilization in which man was in equipoise.” Ibid., 96
The phrase “global modernity” is a coinage of the Turkish historian Arif Dirlik, but the sense intended here follows more closely Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of a “liquid modernity” founded upon fluid networks of global exchange (which Dirlik draws upon himself). See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000), 185–198.
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 60–61.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991), 205–207.
Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 6.
“Time and space, the cyclical and the linear, exert a reciprocal action: … everything is cyclical repetition through linear repetitions. A dialectical relation (unity in opposition) thus acquires meaning and import … One reaches, by this road as by others, the depths of the dialectic.” Ibid., 8.
“[Bourgeois society
Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 1.
Ibid., 2–5.
“The Neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense.” Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 61.
Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” 8, 10, 13–14.
Sigmund Freud, “Repetition-Compulsion,” trans. Theodore Reik, Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (New York: Praeger, 1966), 157.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, in Complete Psychological Works, Volume 18: 1920–1922 (London: Vintage Books, 2001), 36.
Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” 28.
Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real, 66–68.
Ibid., 63.
“There is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference. When it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fêtes, rules and laws, there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference.” Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 6. See also ibid., 9–10, 15, 26, 32, 43, 90.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 76.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Saul K. Padover, Collected Works, Volume 11: August 1851–March 1853 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103.
“Karl Marx’s theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself. Harold Rosenberg illuminates this point in some fine pages: historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 91.
“The historical relativism of the heroic is emphasized in Marx’s contrast between the repetition of tragedy and the repetition of farce, which he defines as the repetition of a repetition.” Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 161.
Ibid., 160–161.
“Conceptually the central problem for the latecomer necessarily is repetition, for repetition dialectically raised to re-creation is the ephebe’s road of excess, leading away from the horror of finding himself to be only a copy or a replica.” Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80.
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Shand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 40.
Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
Paolo Portoghesi, Postmodern, or the Architecture of Post-Industrial Society, trans. Ellen Shapiro (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1983).
Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 1: A New Framework for Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: Jon Wiley & Sons, 2011), 259.
Ibid., 297.
Ibid., 118, 311–312, 332, 335, 353, 407.
Hal Foster, Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (New York: Verso Books, 2003), 35–37.
Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (New York: Verso Books, 2011), 82–83.
Ibid., 85.
Douglas Murphy, The Architecture of Failure (London: Zer0 Books, 2011), 136.
Georges Teyssot, The Topology of Everyday Constellations, trans. Pierre Bouvier and Julie Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 17.
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 12–13.
“The new does not add itself to the old but remains the old in distress.” Theodor Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 95.
Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: The Reproduction of the Relations of Production, trans. Frank Bryant (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 32.
All photographs are copyright Marcus Lyon and appear courtesy of the artist, unless otherwise noted.