Nowhere, Mark Wigley asserts, are the stakes higher for deconstruction than in architecture - architecture is the Achilles' heel of deconstructive discourse, the point of vulnerability upon which all of its arguments -depend. In this book Wigley redefines the question of deconstruction and architecture. By locating the architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, he opens up more radical possibilities for both architecture and deconstruction, offering a way of rethinking the institution of architecture while using architecture to rethink deconstructive discourse. Wigley relentlessly tracks the tacit argument about architecture embedded within Jacques Derrida's discourse, a curious line of argument that passes through each of the philosopher's texts. He argues that this seemingly tenuous thread actually binds those texts, acting as their source of strength but also their point of greatest weakness. Derrida's work is seen to render architecture at once more complex, uncanny, pervasive, unstable, brutal, enigmatic, and devious, if not insidious, while needing itself to be subjected to an architectural interrogation. Wigley provocatively turns Derrida's reading strategy back on his texts to expose the architectural dimension of their central notions like law, economy, writing, place, domestication, translation, vomit, spacing, laughter, and dance. Along the way he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida, explores the structural role of ornament and the elusive architecture of haunting, while presenting a fascinating account of the institutional politics of architecture. Mark Wigley is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt

Arts & Photography

Wigley, Mark

Architecture

Mit Pr

In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing—the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design. Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and designs of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface. White Walls, Designer Dresses shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicolored outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the color of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and color, recovering those sensuously colored surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.

White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture

Nowhere, Mark Wigley asserts, are the stakes higher for deconstruction than in architecture―architecture is the Achilles' heel of deconstructive discourse, the point of vulnerability upon which all of its arguments depend. In this book Wigley redefines the question of deconstruction and architecture. By locating the architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, he opens up more radical possibilities for both architecture and deconstruction, offering a way of rethinking the institution of architecture while using architecture to rethink deconstructive discourse.
Wigley relentlessly tracks the tacit argument about architecture embedded within Jacques Derrida's discourse, a curious line of argument that passes through each of the philosopher's texts. He argues that this seemingly tenuous thread actually binds those texts, acting as their source of strength but also their point of greatest weakness. Derrida's work is seen to render architecture at once more complex, uncanny, pervasive, unstable, brutal, enigmatic, and devious, if not insidious, while needing itself to be subjected to an architectural interrogation.
Wigley provocatively turns Derrida's reading strategy back on his texts to expose the architectural dimension of their central notions like law, economy, writing, place, domestication, translation, vomit, spacing, laughter, and dance. Along the way he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida, explores the structural role of ornament and the elusive architecture of haunting, while presenting a fascinating account of the institutional politics of architecture.

In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing―the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design.
Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and designs of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface.
White Walls, Designer Dresses shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicolored outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the color of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and color, recovering those sensuously colored surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Exercise & Fitness

MIT Press]

Few artists have changed the manner in which photographic images are made, read, and received over the past two decades as dramatically as German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). One of the most important and distinctive artists to emerge in the 1990s, Tillmans’s work is internationally recognized for its powerful reflections on the often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life. With images culled from the entirety of Tillmans’s career, this generously illustrated book accompanies the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in the United States and features the potent effects of his portraits, abstractions, and structural and sculptural motifs. Essays by leading scholars examine the context of the German art and pop cultural scene in which Tillmans first began working in the late 1980s; his use of magazines as both venue and source materials; his unique approach to portraiture; his ability to create a sense of intimacy between the viewer and subjects ranging from his friends to cultural figures and heads of state; and his distinctive approach to presenting his images in displays and installations. A fascinating look at the breadth of Tillmans’s career to date, including his most recent new work, this book demonstrates the renowned abilities of one of the art world’s most revolutionary photographers.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Ferguson, Russell

Birnbaum, Daniel

Ault, Julie

Molon, Dominic

Relyea, Lane

Individual Artists

Yale University Press

For the past twenty years, Judith Barry has brought a critical perspective to contemporary art through her provocative work in video, performance, installation and sculpture as well as through her writing. Barry's long-standing concern with the impact of mediated environments on human identity is grounded in a deep historical understanding of architecture and spectacle--but she also has a fix on what's going inside our bodies and minds. Judith Barry, Projections, Mise en abymeelaborates on the issues central to Barry's oeuvre, and presents the scope of thought that she brings to her work via visual sources ranging from historical materials to contemporary film stills. Barry's cosmos is one of sliding signifiers collapsing notions of time, space, and identity, a universe where a 1970s science fiction film might exist on the same plane as the buildings of 18th century France. Truly epiphanic, the works presented here stare into the abyss of history and dare it to stare back.

Judith Barry: Projections, Mise En Abyme

Humor & Entertainment

Wallis, Brian

Barry, Judith

Movies

Presentation House Gallery/VAFS/Collapse

Documenting an exhibition of the same name, Inside Space showcases the work of six international artists and groups--Elmgreen &amp; Dragset, Teresita Fernandez, Henrik Oleson, Oona Stern, Monica Bonvicini, Juan Maidagan, and Dolores Zinny--all of whom problematize the basic concept of a ''room'' by variously deconstructing, reiterating, materially re-gendering, duplicating, de-rationalizing, de-functionalizing, or disorienting the visitor within them. All of the artists here are equally informed by art and architecture, and Inside Space explores the limits between these two media by presenting the artists' work in architectural-style documentation. Reproduced here are working drawings, photographs of the artists supervising the building and installation of their works, and two views of each finished piece. Inside Space addresses one of the main shifts in the visual arts over the past several years--the increasing propensity of artists to work outside of their field of specialty, delving into such areas as furniture design, animation, and gardening. This ''hybrid'' show and catalogue is a crucial document of artists dealing with built interior space.

Inside Space: Experiments in Redefining Rooms

Oleson, Henrik

Elmgreen & Dragset

Maidagan, Juan

Stern, Oona

Bonvicini, Monica

Dragset

Elmgreen

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

MIT List Visual Arts Center

Bucky Inc. offers a deep exploration of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work and thought to shed new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world. It shows that Fuller’s entire career was a multi-dimensional reflection on the architecture of radio. He always insisted that the real site of architecture is the electromagnetic spectrum. His buildings were delicate mobile instruments for accessing the invisible universe of overlapping signals. Every detail was understood as a way of tuning into hidden waves. Architecture was built in, with, for and as radio. Bucky Inc. rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth-century. It draws extensively on Fuller’s archive to follow his radical thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastic to prosthetics, and data to deep-space. It shows how the critical arguments and material techniques of arguably the single most exposed designer of the last century were overlooked at the time but have become urgently relevant today.

Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio

Science & Math

Evolution

Lars Müller Publishers

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina’s and Wigley’s field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design

Colomina, Beatriz

Fragments of the many practices of the American architect Peter Eisenman are the subject of Barefoot on White-Hot Walls, published in conjunction with the exhibition at the MAK, Vienna. This volume gathers critical texts by Peter Eisenman and other authors, including Mark Wigley and Emmanuel Petit, ample project illustrations from Eisenman's entire career, including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, as well as documentation of the exhibition installation itself. Both the catalogue and the exhibition are collections of autonomous fragments of different moments in Eisenman's varied practice as an architect, including design projects since the 1970s, building analyses, lecture excerpts, biographical information and critical writings. It is as much a retrospective of nearly 40 years of Eisenman's work as it is a document that considers the contemporary relevance of some of his key architectural concepts.

Peter Eisenman: Barefoot On White-Hot Walls

Reference

Petit, Emmanuel

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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