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The Singular Objects of Architecture. Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel. Robert Bononno, transl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 80. $22.95 (cloth).
Hyperbolic, sketchy, and enormously suggestive, these two reworked interviews-originally part of Urban Passages, a series of encounters between architects and philosophers that took place in Paris in 1997 and 1998-are likely to annoy readers committed to disciplined thinking, even as they will leave those willing to wrestle with what is said here with a deeper understanding of the world we live in. In his foreword, K. Michael Hays warns the reader not to expect "that either architecture or philosophy will be treated in this dialogue in anything like a traditional way (which, were it the case, would seem not so much oldfashioned as reactionaiy, coming from two of the few cultural figures practicing today that we could still dare to call progressive)" (vii). What surprised me was how traditional, despite much trendy rhetoric, the key ideas developed in these pages are. Hays may find extraordinary "that architecture and philosophy are treated with any distinction at all by progressive thinkers in our present era." But such a distinction is a presupposition of thinking responsibly about either philosophy or architecture. Theory that blurs that distinction aestheticizes thinking. And just such aestheticizing of theory and of architecture is challenged in this conversation. I was surprised to discover how familiar, despite jargon very much of today, key ideas, and especially that of "the singular objects of architecture," seemed in the end.
Take Baudrillard's pronouncement "I'm for everything that is opposed to culture" (19), here cited first by Jean Nouvel and reaffirmed by the former: "I oppose culture emphatically, with no concessions, without compromise" (20). I cannot hear such words without thinking...