Elaboración del Código G

One of the key premises of this research is that Crosby was a critic who considered his writing and editing, alongside building design, preservation advocacy and urban proposals, to be equally important creative outputs. More specifically, Crosby can be

regarded as a critic and an “architect-historian” who brought his historical studies to bear on contemporary architectural debates. This tendency can be readily detected in his early writings in the AD and it persisted to the end of his career. Crosby also, at times, employed architectural history to explain and strengthen his arguments, including his 1970 publication The Necessary Monument which consisted of a detailed analysis of London’s Tower

Bridge.⁵² In the four chapters of the present research the projects and writings selected all reflect to some degree Crosby’s practice as a critic and an ‘architect-historian.’

This interest in history should be attributed to Crosby’s intellectual upbringing. In his writings, Crosby often referred to forms of architectural history written to promote Modern architecture as his inspirations, including the works of Rudolf Wittkower, Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion.⁵³ He also emphasised the lasting influence of his teacher Rex D.

51 Walker, 49.

52 Crosby, The Necessary Monument.

53 Theo Crosby, Alison Smithson, and Peter Smithson, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design, January 1955.

Crosby, “Night Thoughts of a Faded Utopia.”

Martienssen, a South African Modernist with expertise in ancient Greek town planning.⁵⁴ Even when Crosby became disillusioned about Modern architecture in the 1960s, he

maintained his admiration for these historians and continued to use their works and methods in his preservation advocacy. Meanwhile, his career also became entangled with the

investigations into the shaping of architectural thinking, debates, and design in the post-war era by modern historical studies. The present research takes as its point of departure Crosby’s references to history.

From this point, it builds upon studies of “operative histories” in modern architecture, including the writings of Manfredo Tafuri, Anthony Vidler, and Panayotis Tournikiotis.⁵⁵ I employ the framework established by Tafuri in his Theories and History of Architecture and use Vidler’s writing to link studies in operative history with existing discourses on post-war Modernism and Postmodernism. Tournikiotis’ discursive analysis of operative history, meanwhile, adds clarity to these analyses of the historiography of modern architecture. The term “operative historians,” as Tournikiotis summarises it, refers to historians who celebrate

“the victory of the architecture that was also the object of their historical research.”⁵⁶ The term has frequently been used to describe architectural historians from a German-Swiss art historical tradition including Nikolaus Pevsner, Emil Kaufmann and Sigfried Giedion.⁵⁷ The study of operative history has now expanded to include a generation of critics and historians, mostly active in the post-war era, who were critical of Modern architecture and yet, in the

54 Theo Crosby, “Night Thoughts of a Faded Utopia,” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 197–99.

55 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia, 4th ed. (Granada: London, 1989); Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Panayotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999);

Another study into how architects are influenced by history that the present research consulted is Trevor Garnham, Architecture Re-Assembled: The Use (and Abuse) of History (London, New York: Routledge, 2013).

56 Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture, 14.

57 These historians either studied under or were influenced by the German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. Their method and shared intellectual underpinning are key themes in Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present.

process of their criticism, hoping to revitalise Modern architecture through reframing it in theoretical and philosophical discourse. I consider this conflicting and disillusioned view of Modernism, or what Tournikiotis called “derogative” history, to be an important

characteristic of Crosby’s use of history.⁵⁸

Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present, meanwhile, establish a link between operative history and Postmodernism.⁵⁹ The focus of Vidler’s investigation is a group of writings produced between 1945 and 1975 by Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Banham and Tafuri.

Vidler’s study has particular relevance to this study since it interrogates the role played by operative history in the decline of Modern architecture in the post-war era and the emergence of Postmodernism. In Vidler’s research, he questions whether “the continued reliance on history by architects in the second half of the twentieth century should be seen as the

apparently new phase commonly called ‘postmodernism’” or should be attributed to a kind of

“posthistoire thought” that is ingrained in modernism.⁶⁰ Vidler’s study into the transition between post-war Modernism and Postmodernism also shed light on the intellectual context in which Crosby made his preservationist turn.

Although the present study has benefited from Vidler and Tournikiotis’ works, it is different from these in two notable ways. First, the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which Crosby used history are important to this study because preservationist sentiment is often seen as a response to the particular socio-cultural conditions in late 20^th century Britain.

Secondly, Crosby was not an academic architectural historian and was mostly known through his practice as an architect and a critic. In other words, although he conducted historical

58 Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture, 14–15.

59 Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present.

60 Vidler, 14.

research and participated in debates about history, his works are not usually regarded as part of the corpus of post-war architectural historiography. But Tafuri’s Theories and History of Architecture, which argues that criticism, design, and history had merged, is of significant relevance to the present research. Moreover, I benefit from Tafuri’s formulation that

architecture is not only a profession but an “institution” and “ideology”.⁶¹ This non-material discussion of architecture is relevant to my investigation of the developing preservationist consensus, which can be understood as a shift in the attitude to the relationship between humankind and architecture – a concept which I elaborate in the following section on

‘Environment Design.’

For Tafuri, operative criticism was born from the loss of critical momentum in architecture, after the supposed success of Modernism, when ‘pure’ criticism lost its purpose.⁶² In fact, Tafuri had used New Brutalism as an example of a movement that emerged out of the stagnation which occurred when Modernism became the dominant architectural expression in which he mentions Crosby.⁶³ Tafuri writes,

But criticism, historicism (malgre soi) and reportage are not easily reconcilable.

The acceptance of a given language – Le Corbusier’s materic and objectual – leads to the coherent mannerism of the Japanese new school and to the too often frustrated aspirations of the English circle that will see Theo Crosby, one of the first instigators of the New Brutalism, trying new outlets in the pop fantasies of

‘Archigram’ and the Smithsons arriving at a dignified and agonistic professional integrity.⁶⁴

Although Tafuri acknowledges the positive influence of New Brutalism rhetoric in shaping post-war architectural culture in Britain and beyond, he also criticises it as “an example of non-rigorous criticism, compromised (but also vitalised) by partially developed ideological

61 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture,

Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architectural Theory Since 1968, ed.

Michael K. Hayes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 2–35.

62 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 11,133.

63 Tafuri, 125.

64 Tafuri, 126.

superimpositions.”⁶⁵ I argue that this passage points out some of the weakness in Crosby’s works, but also establishes him as an operative critic and historian.

Tafuri considers that operative criticism “represents the meeting point of history and planning”; it “plans past history by projecting it to the future.”⁶⁶ In describing how the gap between criticism, design and history has been closed, Tafuri also mentions several of Crosby’s contemporaries: Louis Kahn, Geoffrey Copcutt, and James Stirling. Tafuri describes them as architects who “are not satisfied with structuring forms and functions.” ⁶⁷ He writes “they aim, first of all, at making their approach to form readable, they want, in short, to historicise themselves and to lead to a deeply reflected historicised fruition.”⁶⁸ In the four chapters of this study, I return to these definitions to demonstrate they are integral to Crosby’s practice as an operative critic. I also argue that they can be found in Crosby’s works as he moved from a Modernist to a preservationist.

I am aware that part and parcel of Tafuri’s re-conceptualisation of architecture as an

“institution” and “ideology” is intended to situate architecture in a broader critique of

capitalist society. As evidence, many of the keywords in Theories and History of Architecture carry additional meaning. For example, by “operative criticism,” Tafuri refers not only to criticism that seeks to interfere with history and architectural culture but also to criticism that works within and for the structure of capitalism.⁶⁹ The same can be said about terms such as

65 Tafuri, 125.

66 Tafuri, 141.

67 Tafuri, 132.

68 Tafuri, 132.

69 Tafuri discusses more explicitly his critique on the relationship between operative criticism and capitalism in another publication Architecture and Utopia.

Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).

“Plan” and “Project” which Tafuri used in ways other than the usual in architecture.⁷⁰ These ambiguities of Tafuri’s writing may cause confusion, but also describe the kind of history and criticism that Crosby produced. One such example can be found in the chapter “Architecture as Indifferent Object and the Crisis of Critical Architecture” where Tafuri uses an

axonometric drawing from Crosby and Archigram’s 1963 project Fulham Study.⁷¹ Although Tafuri does not study the project in any detail, he suggests that the design epitomises what he regards as the dissolution of architecture into the structure of the metropolis – a “pure object”

that is readily absorbed by the governing logic of capitalism.⁷² These remarks by Tafuri suggest that acknowledging Crosby’s compliance with capitalism should be considered an integral part of understanding his practice as an operative critic/historian.

More specifically, Crosby’s works also manifest many characteristics of what Tafuri named “typological criticism.” Typological criticism, Tafuri observes, is not exactly

historical, but manages to become so by “using instrumentally the results of historical criticism as a support for its current analysis.”⁷³ Typological criticism also has a tendency to take reality as a starting point and to break it down into “single components, or, in extreme cases, its fundamental laws.”⁷⁴ In other words, typological criticism refuses to make an overarching judgement on the complexity of urban structure. In addition, the studies of towns and urbanscapes produced through typological criticism are often influenced by theories and studies on the visual arts. These characteristics can be found in Crosby’s theorisation of urban

70 Andrew Leach, “Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research” (PhD Dissertation, University of Ghent, 2006).

71 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 94.

72 Tafuri’s observation on Crosby’s tendency to create an architectural criticism that assumes the programme of capitalist production was, however, omitted from the translation. Crosby’s name is cited in the Italian and Spanish edition but was omitted from the English translation.

Tafuri also labelled the diagram “Project for a commercial centre in Montreal, 1964.”

Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e Storia Dell’architettura (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1968).

Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 95.

73 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 162.

74 Tafuri, 158–62.

renewal, published in The Necessary Monument and How to Play the Environment Game.⁷⁵ Typological criticism also manifests traits that are often associated with Postmodern architecture: it is “the very kind of appraisal of the renewing qualities of the formally and functionally complex and multi-valent” and “puts in question again the problems that functionalist literature had taken as already solved.”⁷⁶This research employs Tafuri’s articulation of typological criticism as an additional critical lens through which to decipher Crosby’s works, and to magnify their similarities with other discourses in Postmodernism.

0.4 Methodology