December 1999 
December 1999
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About Assemblage
From the start, Assemblage has regularly published work that would otherwise have remained inaccessible except to the specialist: for example, a translation of a newly discovered manuscript on montage and architecture by Sergei Eisenstein; a chapter from the never-published book Museums: Actual and Possible by the nineteenth-century Scottish scientist and educator Sir Patrick Geddes; a translation of a poem by Kurt Schwitters; a documentation of the first prefabricated building in America, the Aluminaire House of 1930-31; a reconstruction of the house Adolf Loos designed in 1928 for Josephine Baker. We also seek out the unusual both in presentation and in content. Work has taken such diverse forms as a legal brief (Jeff Kipnis's defense of deconstruction), stills from a computer-generated animated video (Brian Boigon's Cartoon Regulators), and the painted-over pages of a nineteenth-century novel (Tom Phillips's "New Lamps for Old"). Essays have ranged from Jennifer Bloomer's earliest piece, "In the Museyroom," a dual reading of John Soane's house/museum in London and James Joyce's Ulysses, to Ann Bergren's "Gold's Gym in Venice, Ca.," a weaving together of gender difference, classics, architecture, and bodybuilding, to David Wills's "Designs on the Body," a piece between fiction and criticism that travels through Peter Greenaway's film The Belly of an Architect. Equally, the journal supports work by and about those groups generally excluded from discussions of design culture. Witness Allan Sekula's "Geography Lessons: Canadian Notes," a photographic essay that places the northern Ontario mining community of Sudbury within the productive economy concealed by the slick architecture of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. Or Zeynip Çelik and Leila Kinney's study of how the appearance of the bellydance at the Paris world's fairs was used by a colonial power to construct certain images of the Orient. or Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Alien Staff," an instrument/performance/network that questions the ideological abstraction and social figuration of identity and community, especially in relation to the immigrant. Our documentation of projects has oscillated between built work that in some way continues the experiments of modernism (Diener and Diener, Miralles and Pinós, Juan Navarro Baldeweg) and conceptual drawn work, usually by younger architects (Greg Lynn, Reiser and Umemoto, LAB). In addition, we give room to built work with theoretical implications, such as Nasrine Seraji's Temporary American Center in Paris, MVRDV's Villa VPRO in Hilversum, or Lindy Roy's Spa in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. Over the years, Assemblage has
assembled a number of special issues: Violence Space, Mark Wigley's
collection of forty responses to the conjunction of these two terms; House
Rules,
the Wexner Center for the Art's exploration of diverse perspectives
on and propositions about space as applied to the design of a single-family
suburban home, The Tulane Papers, in which the editorial board gathers
to address the politics of contemporary architectural discourse; and Ruskin
Redux, in which Jennifer Bloomer brings together a group of authors
and artists to reappraise this writer of nineteenth century whose work
is, in so many respects, timely at the commencement of the twenty-first.
At the same time, within the journal we have inserted a number of "envelopes"
inspired by the "re:assemblage" section that has long provided a forum
for ongoing debate and exchange. "The Strictly Architectural" raises
the question of what "properly" belongs to architecture; it may be no more
than a single image or as elaborate as the documentation of Pence Springs
Resort in West Virginia, a structure that was over time, a resort hotel,
a speakeasy, a school for girls, and a state prison for women. "New
Babylons," inaugurated by Lars Lerup's paraliterary work on Houston, charts
out an urbanism of ideas. Finally, "re:view" engages books and conference,
both within and tangential to the discipline, as jumping off points for
larger investigations.
- K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy
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In
its twelfth year of publication, Assemblage is recognized as the
most advanced and widely read forum for architectural history, theory,
and criticism in America and is regarded as the most consistent and scholarly
of all periodicals. We founded Assemblage in 1986 to fill
the void between the commercial magazines that too often reduce architecture
to matters of taste and fashion, on the one hand, and the primarily historical
journals that preclude movement across lines of specialization, on the
other. Since its inception, we have undertaken to assess and sustain
the development of architectural theory and criticism, its self-awareness
of its own history and methods, and the potential for an interaction with
design practice. We have brought to light material previously underrated
by the historical and critical establishment, stimulated thinking about
architecture within an interdisciplinary context, supported younger writers
and emergent ideas, and helped shape a group of authors that is now considered
to be the core of architectural theorists. Recent issues have embraced
such diverse work as Slavoj Zizek's defense of the Slovene postpunk band
Laibach and the discussion of Jose Plecnik's relation to fascism this engenders;
Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu's rereading of Sir Banister Fletcher's
History
of Architecture to surface strategies to postcolonial discourse; and
Adi Shamir Zion's search for a new model of the modern in the age of digital
technology, launched from a critique of Bill Gate's description of his
house as a "test site" for the integration of future technology into the
home. In all of this, we continue to attempt to present the entire
range of material factorsphysical, social, and historicalthat
condition the production of architecture, and their interaction with the
ideologiesthe disciplinary and institutional aparatusesthat enable
and elaborate these factors at particular times.
