Arquitecturas Bis no. 22, May, Barcelona

Issue 22 of Arquitecturas Bis significantly demonstrates the emerging differences between European and American architectural circles at the close of the 1970s. Beyond the tremors of its powerful title “After Modern Architecture,” a polemic unfolded between the editorial members of Oppositions and the editors of several European journals invited to a meeting in New York in February of 1977. Arquitecturas Bis 22 reprints and translates a series of editorial articles originally printed in Oppositions 5, 6, and 7, which here are printed in red and formatted side by side with a set of responding articles that are described as their European counterparts, written by regular contributors to Arquitecturas Bis, and printed in black. The debate over the elusive “end of modernism” hinged on the question of history’s continuity and its relationship to the present through the systems of architectural production, a discussion revealing deep differences between what is described as a European model, in which history is always mediated, and an American model, where criticism has been driven away from practice by market forces tobecome an exclusively academic endeavor. Visually, this issue forfeits images in favor of typography in a prelude to what would become a discursive post-modern system of criticism whose medium would be text, rather than image. Through the form of writing the rise of theory produces an inter-textual graphic of variable font sizes, and signals a shift towards the writing of history as a theory that replaces the architectural project as the center of the debate. DLP

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