NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London

Claire Jamieson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317200048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group's work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London.It traces NATØ's identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATØ's place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group's ethos and development.

1
FROM OBJECT TO ACTION

Performing architecture 1973–81

The dematerialization of architecture

Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates taught together at the AA between 1974 and 1980. Graduating from Tschumi’s Unit 2 in 1974, Coates returned to the school to teach alongside his former tutor for the 1974–75 academic year, before the pair took a two-year hiatus, establishing Unit 10 in 1977–78. After teaching two academic cycles together (1977–78 and 1978–79), Tschumi left London for Princeton and Cooper Union in 1980, and Coates took over as tutor. This was a period of intense activity at the AA under the dynamic leadership of Alvin Boyarsky, who was elected to the school in 1971, and a moment when architects around the world were seeking alternatives to Modernism. An edition of Architectural Review dedicated to the school, published in 1983, describes the character of the AA during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a reflection of the ideologies promulgated by its tutors:

It is possible to identify a certain congruence between the characteristics of the AA as an institution and the content of the teaching within it. The preoccupation of teachers like Bernard Tschumi, Elia Zenghelis, Dalibor Vesely and Peter Cook – with the rich potential of city life, with urbane and exploratory conversation and catalytic encounter, with intensity and autonomy, experiment and invention – are reflected in the collective enterprise to which they contribute. One might even say that the school is a practical demonstration of their theories. It is this intensity, optimism and urbanity that is the antithesis of the defeatism, dull specialisation and narrow parochiality of other architectural schools. The AA is a pocket of resistance to the general suburbanisation of Britain.¹

It was within this context that Tschumi first set out a radical agenda for a unit in 1973. He had studied architecture at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, graduating in 1969, before moving to London to teach at the AA in 1971. Before his arrival in London, Tschumi had spent time in Paris in the late 1960s, working for architectural practice Candilis-Josic-Woods (who were part of Team X), and had witnessed first-hand les événements of May 1968. The experience had the effect of radicalizing the young architect, who began to write polemical articles for journals such as Architectural Design and L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in which he explored what he perceived to be the homogenization of the city – drawing on the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationist International to invoke strategies of resistance and subversion. ² In 1973, Tschumi initiated Unit 2 at the AA, with a politicized ethos that sought to redefine the role of architecture against the optimistic, utopian backdrop of 1960s ideology promulgated by Archigram that had dominated the school for almost a decade.

The unit was concerned with a critical analysis of the city, setting a brief for the students entitled ‘Theory, Language, Attitudes’ which examined consumerism, artificiality, and representationalism – playing on ‘an opposition between political and theoretical concerns about the city’, informed by Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.³ In A Chronicle of Urban Politics, a small book published by the unit in 1973, Tschumi and his students presented their critique of the prevailing urban condition. The volume was one of the first publications produced by the school under Boyarsky, and represents the start of a rich lineage of AA publications.⁴ The small booklet primarily featured short texts produced by Tschumi and the students, supplemented by the films, storyboards, photographs, tapes, and manifestos that lined the walls at the end of year show. Importantly, the publication marked the beginning of what would become a core idea of Tschumi’s over the following decade – that ‘the words of architecture become the work of architecture’.⁵ Reflecting on this early teaching in his text Architecture and Disjunction, he explains how the student projects were a way to consider architecture as a trigger for social and political change, to avoid being a neutral backdrop, if not causing change directly, then ‘accelerating’ it.⁶

Tschumi was also attempting to provide an alternative to what he saw as an obsession with form in architectural culture, striving to move away from discussions happening elsewhere at the AA which centred on Structuralist interpretations. Charles Jencks was lecturing regularly on aspects of the semiotics of architecture at the school during the 1970s, following his seminal 1969 essay ‘Semiology in Architecture’, which would form the basis of his later The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977).⁷ To Tschumi, this approach was distinctly lacking in any consideration of programmatic concerns, a matter he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with by his second year of teaching in 1974, and he described the way that it:

Borrowed from semiotics the ability to ‘read’ layers of interpretation but reduced architecture to a system of surface signs at the expense of the reciprocal, indifferent, or even conflictive relationship of spaces and events.⁸

Disillusioned with the potential for architecture to provide an ameliorative for the inherent failings of society, he shifted emphasis from that first politicized year, stating that: ‘rather than analysing the variables of architectural activities’, the unit would begin to ‘deliberately concentrate on one constant, space’.⁹ Significantly, this was the year that Coates began teaching alongside Tschumi, marking the start of their reciprocal relationship. It was also during this time, in 1973, that Tschumi formed a relationship with RoseLee Goldberg, a curator preoccupied with performance art and the dematerialization of the art object. Goldberg was running the Royal College of Art (RCA) gallery, a space that had originally been conceived to show staff and student work, transforming it into an ‘experimental venue’ that exhibited work by performance and conceptual artists including Christo, Vito Acconci, Brian Eno, Agnes Martin, The Kipper Kids, and Giulio Paolini.¹⁰ Her influence on both Tschumi and Coates played an important role in the evolution of their teaching during this period.

In their first year teaching together, Tschumi and Coates developed what they called the ‘literary projects’, wherein students read texts such as Franz Kafka’s unfinished short story The Burrow and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and were tasked with turning events or programmes from the novels into architectural designs.¹¹ At the same time, Tschumi was Visiting Critic at Princeton University; a brief from the Fall term of 1976–77 details a project titled ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name (1964). In his essay ‘Space and Events’ Tschumi explained that during these projects the text provided a ‘framework for the analysis of the relations’ between the programme and the site.¹² Beyond being a source of inspiration, the novels revealed a fundamental relationship between literature and the design of buildings and space: ‘The unfolding of events in a literary context inevitably suggests parallels to the unfolding of events in architecture’.¹³ The text provided a dialectic between the content of architecture – what happens in the space – and the design of the space itself, setting up a range of different relations from complementing each other, to contrasting disjunctive relations. This signalled the start of the unit’s defining focus: ‘the relationship between spaces and the events that occur within them’ – an ethos which would continue to evolve throughout the pair’s teaching.¹⁴

Alongside teaching at the AA, Tschumi and Coates were both active outside the school – in particular working with artists and architects whose strategies of performance resonated with their own evolving notions of space, primarily enabled by the network that Goldberg introduced them to. Tschumi regularly invited Goldberg to give talks at the AA, and she invited diverse artists including John Stezaker, Victor Burgin, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic, and Christo to speak to his students – a significant move considering the insularity of much architectural education at the time.¹⁵ In her work as a curator, Goldberg was increasingly interested in how artists were incorporating space into their works. During these years she was preparing her 1979 text – Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present – a seminal piece of research on the history and development of performance art in the twentieth century.¹⁶ She observed a growing number of artists whose work was beginning to overlap with that of dancers, musicians, and performers – artists including Bruce Nauman, Klaus Rinke, Dan Graham, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs, as well as British artists such as Gilbert and George, Susan Hiller, Bruce McLean, and the Kipper Kids.¹⁷ The work of these artists implied a sense that space and its relation to the body was now a key part of conceptual art. Writing in Studio International in 1975, Goldberg articulated the idea that via the dematerialization of the art object that had taken place in conceptual art, these new performance w...