![]() Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism are itemized, stereotyped, and put on display, as if laid out in booths or pavilions that the reader- flâneur can wander spectrally to and from. Following a brief interlude near the middle where Murphy touches on the modernist moment, the architectonic of his argument opens up, beginning to resemble the format of a classic nineteenth-century Expo. ![]() In fact, there is a way in which the second half of the book almost forms a microcosm of the original Crystal Palace at Hyde Park described in the first. Its reality is instead displaced onto the unconstrained imaginary space of digital “diagrams,” allowing for infinitesimally intricate, schizoid patterns of design. 8 But Virtualism, a kind of Deleuzean neo-baroque, finds no built equivalent. To be sure, the chapters on Solutionism (postmodernism/“high-tech,” roughly) and Iconism (post-structuralism/“decon,” again roughly) include passing treatments of Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center in Paris and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. 7 This imbalance can be slightly disconcerting for readers who anticipate a continuation of detailed analyses of individual structures beyond the earlier chapters. While the first part of the book is devoted to an interpretation of three specific buildings of the iron and glass age - the glamorous Crystal Palace at Hyde Park, its decidedly less spectacular reincarnation at Sydenham two years later, and the ill-fated Albert Palace off the River Thames - the second part instead deals with three general trends within post-’68 architecture - trends that Murphy christens Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism. One of The Architecture of Failure’s more confusing features is the structural asymmetry of its two sections. 3Ĭertain peculiarities complicate what is otherwise a solid and convincing, if perhaps a bit oversubtle, thesis. The second half of the book covers the drift from exhausted postwar modernism toward the renewal of architectural transparency following the turbulence and upheaval of 1968. Murphy opens with an examination of the “ferro-vitreous” age, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 to Dutert’s 1889 Galerie des Machines. 2 The Architecture of Failure looks at the spans of time that bracket the modern movement on either side. Like his peer, the British architecture critic Owen Hatherley, Murphy sets out to recover through his study the image of “a potential future that only existed in the past.” 1 Whereas Hatherley approaches this theme head-on, however - directly confronting the avant-garde legacy in his 2009 manifesto, Militant Modernism - Murphy prefers to address it more obliquely. The book begins with a description of our present moment as heralding “a new period of R uinenlust,” in which there exists a preponderant passion for the ruins of modernity, as opposed to Romanticism’s earlier infatuation with the ruins of antiquity. Included here are some passages that were excised from the final printed version, as well as some footnotes.ĭouglas Murphy’s debut, The Architecture of Failure (2012), is an odd and unsettling monograph. The following review was published in shortened form several weeks ago in Radical Philosophy 181.
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