Manifesto Architecture

Critical Spatial Practice #3

by Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch (Editor), Markus Miessen (Editor)

A history of the modern architectural manifesto, with a focus on Mies van der Rohe.

The history of the avant-garde (in art, architecture, literature) can't be separated from the history of its engagement with mass media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work; the work did not exist before its publication.

In architecture, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe came to be known through their influential writings and manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines. Entire groups, from Dada and Surrealism to De Stijl, became an effect of their manifestos. The manifesto was the site of self invention, innovation, and debate. Even buildings themselves could be manifestos. The most extreme and radical designs in the history of modern architecture were realized as pavilions in temporary exhibition.

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

Critical Spatial Practice 3
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Dan Graham

Genres: Architecture

110 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture.

She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun little book about the history of architectural manifestos, which Colomina convincingly argues usually precede radical built architecture. Specifically, she argues that radical architects during the “short 20th century,” e.g. the 1920s-1970s, generally expressed their radicalism first in writing, and only afterwards (if at all) in terms of the built forms they produced. Specifically, she argues that the “manifesto” as writing form — staccato sentences, directly named enemies, taking ideas to logical extremes, shameless irreverence toward practicality, rejection of incrementalism, etc. — was the primary medium through which dramatic modernist and postmodernist architectural ideas expressed themselves.

Five basic principles of architectural manifestos:
1. manifestos are media, in dialog with other media
2. design is part and parcel of every manifesto, not merely an illustration of the manifesto’s argument
3. as blueprints for the future, manifestos precede the work
4. every manifesto is a reply to and/or reworking of an earlier manifesto
5. new media imply new manifestos, albeit perhaps in novel forms

[Marina Ibrahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

🌟5 stars. short little book/essay by the goat so who could expect less. Colomina blows my mind, as always, in the way she reconceptualizes the architectural cannon we think we already know (she teaches us otherwise). the way she reorients publication as the heart of architecture; the bud, the conceptualisation, the movement itself, really reframes the way you see architecture and the way you think to work in it. love her, love everything that comes from her pen.

[Gabrielė Černiavskaja · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful