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Abstract
George Baird’s “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent?” was published in 1977 in the Architectural Design special issue on the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). It was republished as “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent” in Baird’s 2015 edited volume, Writings on Architecture and the City. Both publications feature a figure drawn by Madelon Vriesendorp: “Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked.” The re-presentation of the text is a kind of review. Its reader witnesses Baird looking back, siting and contextualizing the work and its construction. This paper critiques the framing and prefacing of “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent” in Writings on Architecture and the City. “Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked” provides the key lens for this inspection. Through this critique, the paper generates specific commentary on the text(s), as well as making broader arguments regarding architectural authorship, the discursive term “critical,” and the moment and tradition associated with that term.
Notes
1. George Baird, “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent?” Architectural Design 47, no. 5 (1977): 326–327.
2. Ibid., 326.
3. George Baird, “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent,” in Writings on Architecture and the City (London, UK: Artifice, 2015), 161–164.
4. Ibid. The image occupies the first page of the article as described, but is not the cover of the journal issue, as this caption seems to suggest.
5. Haig Beck, “Contents,” Architectural Design 47, no. 5 (1977): 307.
6. Baird, “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent?” 326.
7. Ibid., 327.
8. Ibid., 326.
9. Rem Koolhaas, “The Story of the Pool,” Architectural Design 47, no. 5 (1977): 356.
10. Baird, “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent?” 326, 327.
11. George Baird, “Paradox in Regent’s Park: A Question of Interpretation,” Arena: The Architectural Association Journal 81 (April 1966): 272–276.
12. George Baird, “OMA, Neo-Modern and Modernity, 2001,” in Writings on Architecture and the City (London, UK: Artifice, 2015), 174.
13. Ibid. See Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.
14. Baird, Writings on Architecture, 174.
15. Ibid.
16. If the image is related to Vriesendorp’s “Flagrant Delit” here, as later in this paper, these objects might be associated with the Goodyear blimp condom. “Flagrant Delit” was used by Koolhaas as the cover image for Delirious New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
17. The use of this term follows Roland Barthes.
18. Legal name Touko Valio Laaksonen. Notably, Tom of Finland drawings gained mainstream popularity during the 1970s.
19. This text further complicates the analysis of this article, and really begs for another paper. The other three “Parts” discuss Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Colin Rowe, and Joseph Rykwert.
20. Baird, “Les Extrêmes Qui se Touchent,” 161.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 162.
24. Ibid.
25. See Charles Jencks, “Madelon Seeing Through Objects,” in The World of Madelon Vriesendorp: Paintings/Postcards/Objects/Games, ed. Shumon Basar and Stefan Trüby (London, UK: Architectural Association Publications, 2008), 16–19.
26. It could, indeed, be conceived of as a fleshier reiteration of “Flagrant Delit,” the drawings of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings “caught in the act” of sex by the Rockerfeller Center (or, given the deflated Goodyear Blimp condom hanging limply over the edge of the bed, immediately after the act).
27. For contrast, see Kenneth Colburn Jr., “Desire and Discourse in Foucault: The Sign of the Fig Leaf in Michelangelo’s ‘David’,” Human Studies 10, no. 1, “Foucault Memorial Issue” (1987): 61–79.
28. Baird himself gives this meaning: “in my haste, and due to my shaky command of the French language, I mistakenly wrote for the title the phrase ‘extremes qui se touchent’, as opposed to ‘extremes qui touchent’ thus unintentionally evoking masturbation,” Writings on Architecture, 162. Even the word “shaky” alludes to hands. More on this below.
29. John Macarthur and Naomi Stead, “The Judge is not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Architectural Criticism,” OASE 69 (2006): 128.
30. Ibid., 118. The authors here pair “bias” with “timidity”. “Timidity” seems less applicable in this present case.
31. For more on this circle, see Igea S. Troiani, “The Politics of Friends in Modern Architecture, 1949–1987” (PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2005).
32. Macarthur and Stead, “The Judge is not an Operator,” 117.
33. Suzanne Frank, IAUS: An Insider’s Memoir (Bloomington: Author House, 2010), 185. Suzanne and her husband Dick commissioned Eisenman to design their house; the result was House VI, famous for the marital bed divided by a glass strip. While Koolhaas was an IAUS Fellow during work on Delirious New York, Baird’s relation with the Institute was complicated by the work and position of IAUS members Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, who published a strong critique of Baird’s semiological theories of architecture in the first issue of Oppositions (1973).
34. Carter Wiseman, Twentieth Century American Architecture: The Buildings and Their Makers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 246. Quoted in Frank, IAUS, 185.
35. The image had been printed previously in Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949) – see Frank, IAUS, 7.
36. A definitive reading of the penis in the IAUS logo is difficult to realize. The man might be lying on his back, his penis resting on this body; or standing – in which case, the penis would be resisting gravity, possibly erect. The angle of the man’s feet suggests he is bearing the weight of his body, so – despite the size and rendering of the penis – the latter is a slight favorite.
37. Peter Eisenman, “Post-Functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (Autumn 1976): i–iv.
38. Peter Eisenman, “Autonomy and the Will to Critical,” Assemblage 41 (April 2000): 90. “The critical,” Eisenman writes, “begins with the becoming unmotivated of the sign, the potential reduction of the culturally sedimented meaning of signs, so that the message itself becomes the interference. It is interference as foreground and not background that begins to define a fundamental characteristic of the processes of what is, for me, a necessarily existent critical project in architecture;” and “architecture’s criticality […] is the possible articulation of dynamic processes of difference between being and sign within architecture itself.”
39. Botond Bognar, “Toward an Architecture of Critical Inquiry,” Journal of Architectural Education 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 13–34.
40. Ibid., 23–24.
41. The “author-function” here of course refers to Michel Foucault’s term, developed in “What is an Author?, in Josué V. Harari, Textual Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1979 [1969], 141–160).
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Andrew P. Steen
Dr Andrew P. Steen is a lecturer in History–Theory and Design at the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania. Steen researches the intellectual history of architecture and architectural theory, focusing on the mid to late twentieth century. He is interested in the cultural construction of the personas and referents of architecture. Steen’s practice employs close reading and critical analysis. His interrogations of the poetic function of architectural discourse produce academic and creative works.