The Space of Appearance

Combining history, theory, and polemic, George Baird probes the conceptual lineage and current expressions of postmodernism and the critique of modernist architecture over the past four decades, revealing the general failure to develop an architecture that is politically engaged and affirmative of the public sphere. Hannah Arendt's imperative of worldliness plays a pivotal role in Baird's reading of what has come to be called architecture's belief system. It is not enough, he argues, to reject the totalizing models that have been typical both of modernism and of many of its postmodern successors. Rather it is necessary to construct a public "space of appearance" that is large and diverse enough to make places for all of us. Baird stakes out clearly and sharply the recent history of ideas that bear on the field, recovering influences and ideas that have been omitted from standard histories of modernism. The period since 1960 has seen the collapse of the conditions that shored up modern architecture, as conventionally understood, and has also seen modernism succeeded by a whole series of tentative alternatives, none of which has successfully achieved the decisive legitimacy that modernism once held. After an introduction that situates architecture's current dilemmas within the broader currents of cultural theory, The Space of Appearance focuses on specific historical episodes or developments. Each chapter outlines a different controversy or series of controversies, or depicts the gradual and insidious erosion of certain firmly held architectural beliefs. Each chapter is also structured around a conceptual account of issues that have evolved in contemporary cultural theory since the interventions of Arendt in the 1950s.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.