Architecture rests on intellectual as well as material foundations. _cr

s u r f a c e _7 A R C H I T E C T | A R T I C L E S | FORMALISM: MOVE | MEANING [2]

My work on the problem of formalism -- on the problem of what the term "formalism" means -- was first published in an essay in ANY Magazine (Architecture New York): issue 11, 1995. The punctuation of the title -- Formalism: Move + Meaning -- was slightly different from the title of this second essay -- Formalism: Move | Meaning -- which was presented as a paper at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The substitution of the slash or vertical virgule for the "+" sign in this follow-up essay was intended to more nearly convey the inextricable nature of the "M & M" relationship. My work on an earlier article, Drawing as Contemplation, and an ardent interest in and study of the Russian Formalist literary theorists and critics of the nineteen-teens sparked my work on this issue. Their work on the problem of Form and Content in art, together with the invention of semiology by the Swiss linguist Saussure, was central to the ultimate emergence of structuralism in about 1926/27, and, consequently, to the emergence of post-structuralism via Derrida's work in the early 1960s. The ANY essay was published without illustrations, which, though I have a heightened, Formalist-inspired interest in the defamiliarizing device of difficulty, made for a more difficult read than I had intended. This paper was published with only four illustrations, but I presented it with many slides, and I hope to make the unabridged slide-version available on line at some point in the future.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture [ACSA] Annual Proceedings 84: 1996, pp. 251-57 | go to page 1 of 7