IAUS
Diana Agrest in Conversation with Anthony Acciavatti
Undergraduate program in architectural education, Review, 1978
Diana Agrest Films
On Monday June 17, 2013, one-hundred people crowded into the Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to screen Diana Agrest’s The Making of an Avant-Garde: the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1967-1984, a documentary film on the IAUS in New York. Founded in 1967 with close ties to MoMA, the IAUS became an international hub of young, barely-known architects and designers in pursuit of alternatives to the prevailing methods of architectural pedagogy and practice. A professor of architecture at Cooper Union, Agrest has assembled an extensive array of interviews, photographs, and film (in large part from her personal archive) to reanimate the world that was the IAUS and the American scene of architecture that it helped redefine for decades to come. Manifest sat down with Agrest in New York to discuss the documentary, the legacy of the Institute, and the current state of critical discourse in architecture.
Anthony Acciavatti: Why did you feel compelled to make a film about the Institute now?
Diana Agrest: Even though the Institute closed almost thirty years ago, its ending was not pre-mature or even expected. As Peter Eisenman says in the film, it was an “unnatural death.” So time needed to pass before I, or even Peter (who founded the Institute in 1967), could reflect on our experiences. We needed distance. The amount of time and distance needed just so happened to coincide with what I found to be an anti-intellectual sentiment in architecture ten years ago— one that I think still persists to this day. I thought a film about the Institute was a way to bring a critical discourse, perhaps historically, to the present. I didn’t want to be nostalgic or show how someone might revive or replicate what we did in the past. No. I wanted make people, especially young people, aware of the Institute. A film seemed a natural medium, especially because I used to film our events and meetings with my Super 8 camera. I never knew what to do with all of the footage I collected over the years. Becoming a filmmaker was my fantasy career. From the beginning, I knew the Institute was a unique place. I didn’t necessarily know why at the time, but I did feel that the relationships we formed with one another and the work we were doing was significant. So few people today know about what we did there. At long last, Peter was ready to talk about it, and I was ready to talk about it, too.
IAUS dinner
Richard Frank
“there are many places now trying to do things—good things... but the people involved are just organizers and diffusers”
AA: You mentioned that there is no critical discourse today in architecture. Why do you think that is?
DA: I look around and people are subsumed with their careers. Especially today, architects are obsessed with object buildings. They are making easily consumable architecture. Everything is treated as an object now. This is a terrible anachronism. It is all representation—objectifying architecture in this way has lead to a return to expressionism. There is no critical discourse to speak of in architecture. Consumer capitalism is the predominant ideology. At least at the time of the Institute, the Soviet Union represented an ideological counterbalance to capitalism. I don’t want to romanticize the Soviet Union, but there was at least a dialectical relationship back then. I was never a communist. But I do think something was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. The philosophical possibility of an other was lost, which meant that extreme out of control capitalism is all that that’s gotten us in this horrible crisis we are in the middle of. Today there is no alternative.
aA: Would you say the idea of the Soviet Union was a necessary fiction in architecture and culture at large during the Cold War?
DA: It wasn’t the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union per se as a realization of Marxism was a horror. It represented another way of thinking. May be there was something in the middle. The Soviet Union helped define the political context. And as I show in the film, May 1968 and the social unrest in U.S. cities also defined the context of the Institute. There was obviously a cultural crisis. And architecture was in crisis too.
aA: In the film, you depict this crisis, not just as a disciplinary one, but even as a personal one for Peter Eisenman. After being denied tenure at Princeton University in the mid-1960s, he set out to create an alternative to the academy and the profession. For him it seemed neither one was equipped to tackle the crises confronting architecture. Would you say he more or less positioned the Institute as a third way to mediate between these two poles?
DA: Well, I think the Institute was an alternative, a third way of sorts. Few people were engaging architecture critically on the East Coast. In fact, New York was completely off the map. All of the interesting work was coming out of London or Berkeley. No one was coming to New York. The East Coast had a few people doing compelling work. Robert Venturi was certainly one of them. So was Paul Rudolph. Both were trying to shake things up and challenge the status quo. Charles Moore’s work was important too, but he was less about challenging the prevailing system and eventually went west. But there was no organization or group based in New York. The Institute filled this void. We could be innovative and experimental with architecture.
As Peter says in the film, we were not trying to be avant-garde. It became that, but we did not see ourselves that way. Looking back, what we were doing was a very difficult avant-garde. Members of an avant-garde typically look to the future with hope. We were not interested in the future. The future had been a mess. We were not believers in “progress.” We were skeptical of “progress.” Whether that was economic and social progress or technological progress, we remained skeptical. We were doing a negative utopia as Manfredo Tafuri would call it. We were looking to the past. I think you can see this in much of the work at the Institute.
AA: Do you see a similar need today for an alternative to practice and academia?
DA: Is there a situation now that would make people in architecture, society in general, contest structures of authority? We see bits here and there: Occupy Wall Street and other movements, but I don’t know, is there an equivalent situation that would draw people together? I don’t know. There is no dearth of venues and institutions committed to architecture and urbanism today. Nonetheless, I do think there is a major difference between today and when the Institute was founded: there are many places now trying to do things—good things — there’s the Van Alen Institute, Storefront, Design Trust for Public Space, even The Architectural League, albeit in a more established manner, but the people involved are just organizers and diffusers. The Institute was different in that way. The fellows of the Institute were invested in the place. I was one such fellow but there were many of us. Stan Allen is very explicit about the importance of fellows to the culture of the Institute in the film. We were all doing our own work, organizing events and exhibitions, as well as teaching. But we were always straddling these worlds. We were never just in one. It is a major difference to the curator culture of today. You need people who are both architects and committed to working on history and theory. That’s what it was. We didn’t have a party line at the Institute, but we had a direction, a collective inertia. And we all had questions. I remember when the following generation of theorists started publishing Assemblage, I always asked what’s their question? I didn’t see a new question. They were committed to producing academic work rather than intellectual work.
Audience at a panel on Charles Moore, 1977
Diana Agrest films
AA: If you think about documentaries about architecture made in the last ten years, say Daniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003) or the forthcoming film on Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown by their son, they are all biographies. Your film focuses more on a collective undertaking rather than single individual. How important do you think this was to the successes and troubles of the Institute?
DA: Peter always says “we” throughout the film. I didn’t edit out him saying, “me, me, me” all of the time. No. He says we. Even though he founded the Institute and ran it for most of its existence, it was not a singular vision. It was really a collective of people exploring their own set of interests. It was very liberating compared to the prevailing ideas and attitudes about architectural practice and scholarship, a point that both Mario Gandelsonas and Rem Koolhaas make in the film. Peter says the Institute was a place where people “became.” He allowed us to cultivate our own truths. For better for worse, I have my own little truths. We all did. Peter fostered that kind of an environment. He says in the film that when Mario Gandelsonas and I came to New York, things got interesting at the Institute. I had to cut it out because it seemed too self-serving, but Kenneth Frampton said in an interview that we (Mario and I) brought an entirely new discourse. We all brought something to what was a very heterogeneous mix of people and ideas. This of course created argument and debate, all of which made it such a dynamic environment.
AA: You close the film with interviews of a younger generation of pedagogues, both of whom amplify what Stan Allen says earlier in the film: pedagogy developed at the Institute made its way into architectural education across the U.S. In other words, the Institute clearly has a legacy today in American architectural education. How do you feel about this legacy in light of the lack of critical discourse you see in architecture today?
DA: I think it is very presumptuous to believe that the Institute in anyway shaped pedagogy across the U.S., but I think it is true. It's a curious thing because we were not a school. We taught courses but we were never an independent and accredited college or university. Anthony Vidler says we were like the Bauhaus— it comes and then disappears—but how do you compare the Institute with Bauhaus? Barbara Jakobson had a great answer. She said the Bauhaus was a technical institution. We were in no way a school or a technical institution. And unlike the Bauhaus, where the future was looked on with great hope, we were almost dystopian in our world view. We were critical. So while our work filtered through the architectural community over time, with many adopting various techniques of representation and analysis and even architectural form cultivated at the Institute, they ignored what critical questions brought us to those techniques. In other words, it became stylized. Lucia Allais says that what the Institute was about, content wise, is absolutely not pertinent now, whatever that means. She says there are other issues pertinent today. I don’t know what those issues are, but I do think a major change between now and back then is the role of philosophical references. There was a general interest in incorporating philosophers and critics into work. Unfortunately, all of this is gone. To be blunt, critical work doesn’t sell. This accounts for its disappearance, in my opinion. But we all had questions, and questions will arise when people have enough agony in their lives. We certainly did. And I suspect there is plenty to agonize about today, too.