david hodge the difficult whole: siah armajani, robert venturi...

381 | Hodge: The difficult whole

In 1980, the Iranian-American sculptor Siah Armajani made a number of outdoor installations, called ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens (e.g. Reading Garden #1, figs. 1, 2, 3). Some of these remain extant, while others have been dismantled. Each comprised a cuboid shed with an open front along with various benches, fences and screens. They were primarily made of wood and painted in white, black, redwood brown and dark, ‘park bench’ green. Although their titles suggest a functional purpose (i.e. ‘reading room’ or ‘meeting room’), they all resisted use to a significant extent. In each installation some of the fences closed off areas of grass, and Armajani did not incorporate gates or openings to render these spaces accessible. The sheds were often empty and even when they did contain furniture, they generally lacked sufficient light for comfortable reading. Furthermore, Janet Kardon has noted that the benches were built with a ‘cultivated clumsiness; the right angle joining seat to seat-back is discomforting enough to make sitting an active, rather than passive activity’.1 As Nancy Princethal puts it, the gardens were therefore ‘elusively inviting’.2 Their promise of functionality was swiftly rescinded by their deliberately ungainly, cumbersome forms.

Since 1968, Armajani has consistently made art on the border between sculpture and architecture, with works including bridges, gazebos, reading rooms and other architectural structures. In a manifesto written in 1978, Armajani pledged himself to a practice of ‘public sculpture’, which should be ‘less about the self-expression and myth of the maker and more about its civicness’. This text also rejected the traditional assumption that artworks should be functionless, instead arguing that public artists should aim to satisfy a general ‘social and cultural need’.3 Based on this rhetoric, critics discussing Armajani’s work have commonly argued that his works are open and democratic by virtue of the way that they integrate public engagement through invitations to use.4 However, while this approach accurately reflects the artist’s statements, it does not really speak to his works, since many of his constructions are actually impossible to use and even when they do invite interaction, they usually render it difficult and uncomfortable.

According to Armajani, these barriers to use play a key role in determining his works’ relationship with the medium of sculpture. Although he often calls himself a ‘sculptor’, in 1978, when asked whether his architectural installations should really be categorized within that medium, he acknowledged that it is difficult to say.5 However, he suggested that they could be seen as ‘non-functional … architecture’, a category which ultimately shares ‘the same

doi:10.3828/sj.2016.25.3.7

The difficult whole: Siah Armajani, Robert Venturi and the politics of modernist architecture

David Hodge

382 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

properties as sculpture’. Furthermore, as architectural constructions that resist functionality, he argued that his works comprise ‘investigations into the qualities and properties … of lived-in structures’.6 In other words, through their autonomy from the functional demands of architecture – or their status as sculpture – Armajani’s works invite meditation on the built environment. By resisting utility, they maintain a function as platforms for thought.

Any reflection on Armajani’s works must come to terms with their deeply counterintuitive compositions. The ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens all feature parts joined together at acute and irregular angles as well as benches placed in strangely isolated positions or located at oblique orientations to other elements of the work. Describing Meeting Garden (1980), Kardon has written that ‘a number of disparate elements … sprawl in a seemingly aleatory arrangement’.7 The works’ decidedly inharmonious compositions are further confused by the way that fences, walls and screens frequently act as barriers. These impede the viewer’s gaze, ensuring that the installations can never be apprehended as a whole. Their oddly jumbled arrangements therefore unfold through a series of physically and perceptually isolated experiences.

In 1978, Armajani suggested that his deliberately awkward compositions addressed a concern regarding the relationship between part and whole. Although the following passage specifically discusses ‘the house’, it equally resonates with his experiments in other architectural formats:

The house does not appear to me first in terms of houseness, but rather in terms of its individual parts … walls, doors, floor, etc. By focusing on

1. Siah Armajani, Reading Garden #1, 1980, wood, metal and paint, dimensions unknown. Roanoke College (Roanoke, Virginia)(photo: Roanoke College)


the parts, rather than the whole, I am trying to substitute synergy for gestalt. This means that the individual parts do not necessarily make or predict the whole. Synergy is a process in which the whole, as revealed through the relationship of its parts, is not complete … the house is a kind of event which generates certain perspectives so that one can view or experience it. It doesn’t mean, however, that one perspective is consistent or adequate for all the parts, nor does it mean that each side is going to enhance the previous experience of the other side, but may even contradict it, or annihilate it altogether.8

This mode of ‘synergetic’ composition is exemplified by the ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens. Their isolated benches and awkward conjunctions stop the works’ components from ever establishing an overall gestalt. The visual blockages caused by fences and screens also fragment the viewer’s experience into a series of discrete ‘perspectives’. In the same interview Armajani stated that, by disrupting any holistic apprehension of his works’ component parts, he sought to encourage ‘an exploration of [their] distinct properties’. Since the parts of his constructions refuse to form a clear unity, he said, they ‘must be recognized as distinct and considered separately’.9 However, physical connections and spatial juxtapositions between the installations’ elements also confront viewers with the question of composition. Benches often traverse the outsides of fences, adopting these low partitions as seat backs. Open ‘arches’, comprising thin wooden beams, run down from the top of each shed to the furniture in front of it. In Reading Garden #1 (1980), a long fence runs from one side of the work to the other, forming its isolated elements into an ensemble. So, while each element is offered up in its idiosyncratic particularity, the works also continually pose the question of interrelation as an enigmatic puzzle.

This article explores Armajani’s concern regarding the relationship between part and whole in architectural composition. It shows that his interest in this issue developed through a dialogue with the architect and theorist Robert Venturi. However, it will also situate both figures within a longer trajectory of modernist architecture, highlighting De Stijl as a

particularly important precursor. Furthermore, it will argue that Armajani’s sculptures initiate a critique of Venturi’s early writing, making a significant intervention into the architectural theory of the post-war period and reconnecting architectural practice with its roots in the politics of class struggle. For Armajani, the technical and aesthetic aspects of construction are always inseparable from social and political concerns. This is lucidly revealed in a passage from an essay he wrote in 2002, which discusses part–whole relations in the context of American vernacular architecture:

2. Siah Armajani, Reading Garden #1 (model), 1980, wood, dimensions unknown, location unknown (photo: Siah Armajani)


In the early American log cabins, grain elevators, silos, farm houses, barns, and bridges, the structure, the framing, and the boarding were open. There were gaps in the process in order to reveal the construction … The materials were on their own and could not be overlooked … In construction one part did not mask the other. One part was always next to the other part as a chair was next to the wall or a table was by the window; one resided next to the other. One looked after the other. One belonged to the other and the two belonged to a totality.10

Having begun purely as a discussion of architectural style, by its end this passage clearly becomes a metaphor for egalitarian cohabitation. It thereby reveals the underlying impetus for Armajani’s formal experiments – the question of how different individuals can live together, without relationships of domination.

Armajani, Venturi and the ‘difficult whole’

In 1978, Armajani referenced Robert Venturi’s first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), as a major influence for his own ideas about architectural composition.11 Venturi’s text is a trenchant critique of ‘Modern architecture’ (always with a capital ‘M’). Indeed, although he has consistently rejected the term, Venturi is often presented as either one of the first ‘postmodern’ architects, or at least as a major influence over the development of postmodernism.12 Citing Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier as key examples, Complexity and Contradiction argued that ‘Modern’ architects sought to exclude any hint of stylistic diversity and totally subordinated every element to a single, uniform aesthetic. For instance, Venturi presented modernists’ common preference for the standardization of

3. Siah Armajani, Reading Garden #1, 1980, wood, metal and paint, dimensions unknown. Roanoke College (Roanoke, Virginia)(photo: Roanoke College)


units (as in Le Corbusier’s urban plans) as a ‘dreaded’ agent of ‘domination and brutality’. He also criticized modernists’ refusal to engage with the existing context around a building, which might force the integration of varying styles.13

In opposition to this homogenizing approach, Venturi championed an architecture that ‘accommodates the circumstantial contradictions of a complex reality’.14 According to him, this meant producing buildings which would stylistically express the diversity of both their functions and their environment, leading to ‘ambiguity’, ‘tension’ and ‘oscillating relationships’, with different styles jostling against each other. Venturi saw this as a positive development, promoting ‘richness of meaning over clarity of meaning’.15

Crucially, however, Venturi insisted that ‘[a]n architecture of complexity and accommodation does not forsake the whole’.16 Instead, he argued that such an architecture should produce ‘the “difficult whole”’ or ‘embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion’.17 In other words, architects should seek modes of composition which would allow their components to form a shared unity, without sacrificing their particularity. ‘Planning on whatever scale level should provide a framework … for the twin-phenomenon of the individual and the collective without resorting to arbitrary accentuation of either one at the expense of the other.’18 This same desire is continually manifested in Armajani’s practice, as exemplified in the ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens.

Discussing Venturi in 1978, Armajani made it clear that he understood the architect’s ideas in political terms. ‘I am strongly influenced by Robert Venturi’s writings,’ Armajani stated, ‘especially his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. His perspective on American social democracy is very important because it incorporates political, social and economic considerations. It is the attitude of inclusion, not exclusion.’19 This particular framing of Venturi’s work is notable because, aside from occasional, vague references to ‘social needs’, Complexity and Contradiction lacks any direct political commentary or even any discussion of architecture’s place in a broader social framework, beyond purely artistic concerns.20 While many of its ideas can certainly be read as social metaphors, Venturi very rarely frames them in such terms himself. It is therefore only in Armajani’s work that the architect’s call for diversity became explicitly politicized.

Given its historical context, Armajani’s interpretation of Complexity and Contradiction as a socially minded text is understandable. The book was published in 1966, the year when the term ‘Black Power’ began to gain currency in the USA. Amid growing racial tension and increasing awareness of the oppression of African Americans, it is not surprising that a book about aesthetic diversity and inclusiveness might be read in political terms. Furthermore, other writers who dealt with similar architectural issues during this period did invoke politics more explicitly. In 1969, for example, Denise Scott Brown – a close collaborator of Venturi’s – wrote an essay which also denounced modernism for its ‘normative’ approach.21 However, rather than explaining the problem in purely artistic terms, she attacked ‘the class biases’


of most trained urban planners. She urged them to ‘develop a respectful understanding’ regarding the ‘felt needs and way of life’ of people from different backgrounds. ‘This,’ she wrote, ‘is a socially responsible activity.’22

Many of Armajani’s works evoke comparable concerns regarding the lives of the excluded and oppressed. For example, as I have discussed elsewhere, between 1975 and 1977 Armajani made a series of works relating to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the home he designed and built for himself in Virginia. All of these sculptures subtly acknowledge the former president’s slave ownership by alluding to the underground rooms, beneath Monticello, in which Jefferson’s domestic slaves worked.23 Another example, discussed at length by Valérie Mavridorakis, is his group of pieces relating to the Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were executed in the USA in 1927. Mavridorakis argues that these works (e.g. Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room, 1987) ‘commemorate activists prosecuted for acts of social unrest … at one of the most repressive moments of twentieth-century America’.24 However, Armajani’s statements about Sacco and

Vanzetti also suggest an identification with their status as immigrants – an unsurprising sympathy given his own background. ‘Sacco and Vanzetti, their demand was very simple,’ he has stated; ‘they said “in Italy we read that the constitution guarantees us happiness, the constitution guarantees us education, and we have been here all these years, and I am selling fish, and Vanzetti is fixing shoes, and we don’t have any other education – what happened? Who broke these promises?”’25

In some instances these political concerns can be connected directly with Armajani’s formal techniques. Nancy Princenthal has observed that the awkward junctions between components that feature in many of his sculptures can be understood as products of a certain ‘[c]ross-cultural influence’. Specifically, ‘[t]he irregular angles at which walls meet’ in his works ‘can be seen as translations into three dimensions of the nonperspectival composition used in Persian miniatures’.26 Armajani first experimented with the aesthetics of Persian miniature painting in early works such as Songs (1957), which were made before he left Iran at the end of the 1950s. Since the mid-1980s he has also made many drawings (including Stuttgart Bridge No. 5, 1997, fig. 4), which include images of his own sculptures, as well as depictions of vernacular American architecture, all represented via a perspectival system derived from Persian miniatures. These works frequently depict sections of fencing, which are much like those in the ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens,

4. Siah Armajani, Stuttgart Bridge No. 5, 1997, coloured pencil on mylar, location unknown (photo: Siah Armajani)


although their sharp, angular corners are further accentuated by the multiple perspectives of traditional Iranian painting. So, in these drawings, Armajani’s deliberately jarring conjunction of forms is directly related to a combination of cultural reference points – a spatial system from Iranian art juxtaposed against picket fences and other vernacular American forms. Raising questions regarding immigration and multiculturalism, these works directly inject Venturi’s ideas with political concerns.

Although Armajani clearly drew a great deal from Complexity and Contradiction, his insistent politicization of Venturi’s ideas has also led to major differences between them. This is most clearly illustrated through a work which initially presents itself as a straightforward homage to Venturi, but actually diverges from his ideas significantly. In 1970, Armajani made a small wooden model called Bridge for Venturi (fig. 5), one of an extensive series of bridges he has designed since 1969. An opening at the bottom-middle of this sculpture leads upwards via enclosed slopes on both sides. The columns supporting its weight all comprise a number of cuboid blocks, which are stacked on top of each other in assymetrical and seemingly unstable patterns, making the bridge feel quite precarious. This sense of instability is emphasized by a network of struts running in various directions across the front of each enclosed section and bracing the object’s sides. Slightly messy in places due to the bridge’s unusual slope, the struts run down towards the columns, emphasizing the lines of force being silently exerted upon the dubious supports. With its truss system and solid presence, the work also strongly evokes the aesthetics of industrial architecture.

Bridge for Venturi takes its impetus from a specific passage of Complexity and Contradiction in which bridges are said to embody the contrast between an aesthetic of imposed uniformity and the complexity which arises when accommodating buildings to existing landscapes. According to Venturi, the bridge ‘vividly expresses the play of exaggeratedly pure order against circumstantial inconsistencies’. This is because the neat engineering of a bridge’s upper surface, designed to efficiently convey vehicles ‘over an even span … strongly contrasts with the exceptional accommodation of the structural order below, which through distortion – the expedient device of

5. Siah Armajani, Bridge for Venturi, 1970, wood, stain, 14 × 76 5/8 × 12¼ in. (35.5 × 194.5 × 31 cm). Walker Art Center (photo: Walker Art Centre)


elongated or shortened piers – accommodates the bridge to the uneven terrain of the ravine’.27 Bridge for Venturi emphasizes this contradiction. Its precarious columns highlight the devices and distortions used to produce a semblance of uniformity, refusing any sense of smooth passage and emphasizing the strenuous labour that its artifice involves. However, despite its strong resonance with Venturi’s claims, the work diverges from his approach significantly. Rather than realizing a ‘difficult whole’ by removing any subordination of the work’s elements, it allegorizes the way in which any ‘easy unity of exclusion’ enlists, entraps and subjugates individual components to achieve a false image of harmonious balance. In other words, instead of modelling utopian collectivity, Bridge for Venturi takes a critical approach, expressing the oppressions which operate within dogmatic universalism. Here Armajani presents the ‘difficult whole’ not as a living presence, but as a lack or a demand which remains to be met.

As well as being a formal exercise, Bridge for Venturi also presents itself as a metaphor for the social status of the working class. The blocks supporting the bridge carry a palpable physical load, standing in as surrogates for the anonymous workers whose bodily exertion (or ‘dead labour’) is congealed into all of the architectural constructions around us. Armajani has frequently expressed a strong identification with ‘ordinary’ working-class labourers. For example, he often likes to ask people who they think is the most important modern artist. When they inevitably name Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo or some other famous modernist, he answers ‘no – it’s the workers who painted the Forth Bridge’.28 This identification with working-class labour is also manifested throughout his practice by near-constant references to industrial and vernacular architecture, as in all of the works discussed here thus far.

However, while in interviews and statements Armajani has generally stressed the dignity of manual labour, Bridge for Venturi allegorizes the

6. Siah Armajani, Red School House for Thomas Paine, 1978, corrugated metal, plexiglass, wood, paint, 10 × 34 × 22 feet (3 × 10.4 × 6.7 m), destroyed (shown installed at Philadelphia College of Art, 1978) (photo: Siah Armajani)


difficulty of physical toil and even the exploitation of proletarian work, which forms the lifeblood of the capitalist economy. As Karl Marx famously demonstrated, capitalism in all of its forms is totally dependent upon the subordination of an oppressed class, without whose systematically under-rewarded labour no profit could accrue.29 I stress this here because Armajani’s acknowledgement of class conflict places significant pressure on the politics of diversity implied in Complexity and Contradiction. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued, class is a form of difference which, unlike gender, sexuality or ethnicity, can only ever be oppressive.30 Class relations are by definition relations of power, hence the traditional socialist emphasis on the creation of a classless society. So, while Armajani’s concern regarding the plight of oppressed groups shows that he shares Venturi’s belief in inclusivity, Bridge for Venturi also demonstrates two important differences between them. First, by insistently presenting the ‘difficult whole’ as a both a political metaphor and a painful lack, rather than an established aesthetic structure, Armajani reminds the viewer that its utopian demand remains unanswered and can never adequately be met until it is solved throughout the entire social sphere, beyond the limited realm of art. Secondly, whereas Complexity and Contradiction presents heterogeneity as a good in itself, Bridge for Venturi complicates this assumption, countering Venturi’s fetishization of difference by suggesting that this concept must constantly be resituated against the horizon of ongoing social struggles.

Armajani and modernism’s ‘difficult whole’

One work by Armajani that can be associated directly with the concept of the ‘difficult whole’ is a large architectural installation called Red School House for Thomas Paine (1978, now destroyed, figs. 6, 7, 8). According to Kardon, when asked about this piece around the time of its construction, Armajani explicitly connected it with ‘the influence of the architect Robert Venturi’.31 This connection is equally evidenced by the work’s composition, which offers another exemplary instance of Armajani’s ‘synergetic’ approach. Like so many of his sculptures, the ‘school house’ was not actually functional. Its structure comprised four separate units (entry, portico, corner and exit) arranged in a lop-sided ‘V’ shape with no internal passages between them.32 These four sections were placed in a deliberately illogical order – for example, the ‘portico’ (see fig. 8) sat behind a side wall rather than in front of the entrance. Furthermore, as Kardon noted, the walls were out of scale with each other, often extending significantly beyond the structures behind them and thus making it impossible to gain an overall sense of the work from any given perspective.33 Through its title, Red School House invited viewers to explore a single, coherent building, but this was consistently denied by its actual form, which instead generated a series of conflicting perspectives.

Although in many ways Red School House exemplified Armajani’s close engagement with Venturi’s ideas, at the same time it also marked a significant


divergence from the most basic claims made in Complexity and Contradiction. Venturi presented his notion of the ‘difficult whole’ as a departure from modernist aesthetics, proposing a clean break within architectural practice. Red School House is one of many works by Armajani that undermine this argument by producing complex and contradictory relationships through distinctly modernist techniques. In this and other sculptures, Armajani elided Venturian theory with modernist practice, refusing any clear distinction between them.

As Kardon noted, Red School House appears to have walls built to fundamentally different scales, with some reaching significantly beyond the height of the interior space. In some cases the protruding upper sections are black, while the area beneath them is white, emphasizing the mismatch between inside and outside. A comparable approach features in many of Armajani’s other works (such as One Bedroom House, 1972), where parts often overlap each other, rendering them visually distinct. This method has an important precursor in the work of the Dutch modernist architect Gerrit Rietveld, who was a member of the De Stijl group during the 1910s and 1920s. In works such as Red and Blue Chair (1917) and Rietveld Schröder House (1924, co-designed with Truss Schröder), Rietveld pioneered a particular method of joining components whereby all of the parts had overhanging edges, reaching past the far side of any adjacent forms. A small-scale version of this can also be seen in the crossbars running along the top of Bridge for Venturi. In such a composition, each element reads as a discrete shape, rather than being subordinated to an overall gestalt. Or, as Michael White explains, the Rietveld joint ‘allowed each structural element to preserve a visual identity while clearly expressing its dependency on its neighbours’.34

Like Rietveld, Armajani has also often used colour to produce visual distinctions between a work’s components. In many of Armajani’s architectural sculptures, including Red House and Lissitzky’s Neighborhood: Centre House (1978), adjacent forms are painted in bright, contrasting hues, clearly differentiating them from each other and securing their status as separate components.35 Precisely the same technique can be seen in Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair as well as the interior of the Rietveld Schröder House, where highly saturated primary colours (as well as areas of black and white) strongly demarcate different areas of the space.

White has noted that these contrasts inside the Rietveld Schröder House are functional as well as decorative. Both Schröder and Rietveld wanted the house to have an open plan, but Schröder (who subsequently lived there with her children) was also concerned to enable some degree of privacy.36 This was partly achieved through movable partitions on the top floor, which can create separate rooms or be pulled back to enable an open space. However, White argues that Rietveld, who designed the building’s colour scheme, also employed its hues to similar ends. For instance, he painted the floor of the boys’ sleeping area bright red, helping this space to retain a degree of visual separation even when the partitions are removed. Similarly, White notes that a ‘large white stripe running from the front to the back of the house separates


the boys’ from the girls’ rooms … and leads the visitor around the stairwell to the seating area’.37 This is important because, when the partitions are pulled back, inhabitants coming up the stairs face into these two sleeping areas, totally integrating the spaces with the communal movements of the house. White suggests that by visually separating the two spaces from each other and from the stairs, Rietveld tried to maintain a subtle distinction between public and private, balancing the family’s shared living arrangements with each member’s own personal space. I stress this functional aspect of Rietveld’s colour composition because it shows that almost forty years before the publication of Complexity and Contradiction, a modernist architect was already attempting to maintain a delicate balance between individuality and cohabitation, not only in aesthetic terms, but also within the social conditions that his buildings established.

This comparison demonstrates that the dream of the ‘difficult whole’ was already a key concern for at least one major modernist. Moreover, the same issue was also live throughout the work of the De Stijl group and was especially important for its leader, the painter Theo Van Doesburg. Through the detailed discussion of Van Doesburg that follows, we will see that for him this was an absolutely central issue, crossing boundaries between art and architecture as well as aesthetics and politics.

Van Doesburg first began to experiment with abstraction in 1915, making the leap to fully abstract work in 1917. For two years after that (as well as in various other compositions from later periods) he pioneered a technique that resonates with Armajani’s work in very interesting ways. Van Doesburg’s earliest abstract paintings and stained-glass designs (such as Stained-Glass Composition IV, 1917) were made through the repetition of fairly simple assymetrical motifs. As Richard Padovan explains, these patterns are put through ‘various kinds of translations, reflections and rotations’, so each iteration looks different, even where it is formally identical to some of the

7. Siah Armajani, Red School House for Thomas Paine, 1978, corrugated metal, plexiglass, wood, paint, 10 × 34 × 22 feet (3 × 10.4 × 6.7 m), destroyed (shown installed in Dayco Park, Dayton, Ohio, 1978)(photo: Siah Armajani)


others.38 This means that each painting has a unifying compositional principle which proceeds not through the subordination of components to a fixed schema, but instead through the variation of elements and the production of visual diversity. Van Doesburg’s paintings and stained-glass designs therefore represent one attempt at what Venturi would later call ‘the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion’.

Ideas much like Venturi’s concept of the ‘difficult whole’ also appear in Van Doesburg’s writings. Padovan notes that by differentiating his patterns, Van Doesburg effectively disguised his own technique, so that viewers will generally not immediately recognize his process as one of repetition.39 Only by reflecting on the work over time will they unravel the artist’s procedure. Van Doesburg discussed this in 1925, arguing that, in his preferred mode of aesthetic experience, the viewer ‘shares inwardly in the creation’ of each work. As they tease out the painting’s compositional principle, he claimed, it undergoes ‘a new re-creation in the consciousness of the observer’.40 Consequently,

the observer is compelled … to experience with the artist the continual and repeated exchange and cancelling out of position and dimension, lines and planes. He will understand how harmonious relationships finally spring from this play of recurrent exchange and cancelling out of one element by another. Each part unites with other parts. The formative unity of the whole grows out of all the parts (but single parts of the whole do not dominate and stand out).41

Here we find a conception of aesthetic experience in which unity emerges through the interrelation of distinct parts, which combine through the fact of their individuality and difference, rather than on the basis of an external or abstract mediator. This suggests that, for Van Doesburg, true harmony was not to be produced through levelling schemas or the cancellation of particularity, but instead via the egalitarian collaboration of diverse components.

Van Doesburg was also interested in how these ideas and techniques could apply to the built environment. In his essay ‘Towards a plastic architecture’ (1924), he wrote that ‘[t]he new architecture has destroyed both monotonous repetition and the rigid symmetry of two halves’.42 He did not specify which buildings he meant, but one candidate might be the Rietveld Schröder House, which features four visually distinct façades. ‘Against symmetry,’ he wrote, ‘the new architecture sets the balanced relationship of unequal parts, i.e., of parts which, because of their different functional character, differ in position, dimension, proportion and location.’43 Here Van Doesburg’s text acknowledges the importance of diversity, championing an approach to architectural design which operates through rather than against the varying particularity of its elements. As well as the design of individual structures, he suggested that this principle should also be applied to the ‘building group’ and the the whole ‘town’. As Padovan has argued, Van Doesburg’s ‘idea of the unique, unrepeatable single unit that nevertheless forms part of a harmonious,


unified street or city exactly parallels the concept of the individual who remains perfectly free while united with society’.44

‘Towards a plastic architecture’ shows that, for Van Doesburg, it was crucial to apply these ideas beyond the limited sphere of fine art, extending them to the whole space of the city. This speaks to a broader trend within modernism in general since, as Peter Bürger famously argued, the historic avant-garde continually sought to undermine distinctions between art and life or aesthetics and politics.45 This is demonstrated throughout Van Doesburg’s writing. In 1926, for example, he argued against an overly functionalist approach to architecture, conjuring the nightmarish image of a city ‘reduced to only those elements which would gratify our material requirement for life in the most economical way’. In such an environment, he argued, the architect would ‘define precisely the amount of cubic meters required for every practical need and cut out all the superfluous space. The architectural shape would become totally dependent upon our movements, which then could be checked by means of a Taylor-system. Would this not lead to an absolute rigidity and sterilization of our lives?’46 Through his reference to Taylorization – an approach to industrial efficiency focused on the standardization of bodily movements and workplace procedures – Van Doesburg showed that he was worried not only about aesthetic homogenization, but also about the mental and physical restraint imposed within a rigid industrial environment. Unlike in Complexity and Contradiction, here there is no clear border between aesthetics and politics, with one immanently flowing into the other.

These examples from Rietveld and Van Doesburg clearly suggest that the idea of the ‘difficult whole’ was already alive within modernism. However, these are only two artists, and it may yet be suspected that De Stijl was simply an outlier within a modernist movement that otherwise generally accords with Venturi’s claims. In one sense this is indeed the case, since

8. Siah Armajani, Red School House for Thomas Paine, 1978, corrugated metal, plexiglass, wood, paint, 10 × 34 × 22 feet (3 × 10.4 × 6.7 m), destroyed (shown installed in Dayco Park, Dayton, Ohio, 1978) (photo: Siah Armajani)


the formal solutions proposed by other modernist architects are usually closer to Venturi’s image of ‘the Modern’ than they are to those proposed by Van Doesburg and Rietveld. Nonetheless, even when their practices were characterized by stylistic normativity, modernists consistently demonstrated an awareness regarding the ‘difficult whole’ as a significant problem with which they were confronted. This can be demonstrated via an architect whom Venturi cited as a key offender – Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier’s large-scale housing projects and city designs (e.g. Unité d’Habitation, 1947) were all based on a cellular logic, with strictly separated dwelling units combined into a single, shared building. Padovan has noted that one key inspiration for this approach was the compartmentalized organization of Carthusian monasteries, which Le Corbusier had first experienced at Galluzzo in Florence in 1907. Padovan explains that in a Carthusian monastery, ‘each monk lives apart in a self-contained house with its own courtyard garden’, a design which ‘combines a high degree of individual privacy (the “cell”) with a structured pattern of collective life: the refectory, the chapter house, the abbey church’.47 Le Corbusier himself discussed this upon returning to the Galluzzo monastery in 1911, writing: ‘[m]y first impression … was one of harmony, but not until later did the essential, profound lesson of the place sink in on me – that here the equation which it was the task of human wit to solve, the reconciliation of “individual” on the one hand and “collectivity” on the other, lay resolved’.48 His answer to this problem was undoubtedly very different from that of De Stijl, Venturi or Armajani, since his cellular model involved rigorous standardization, with a single formal logic presiding over every unit. However, this example suggests that even the most rigidly normative modernists could still be alive to the problem of the ‘difficult whole’. I submit that the whole field of modernist architecture swirls around this problem, not acting as a monolithic tendency with a single, uniform answer, but instead as a contested terrain, evidencing a multiplicity of different approaches.

Armajani’s intervention into architectural theory

Despite his strong identification with the arguments presented in Complexity and Contradiction, we have seen that Armajani made two major amendments to Venturi’s concept of the ‘difficult whole’. First, rather than treating it purely as an aesthetic idea solely relating to issues of formal composition, for Armajani it was always also a political issue, concerning social relationships between diverse individuals. Secondly, whereas Venturi presented his theory as a departure from modernism, for Armajani it was in fact a continuation of the modernist tradition. In this section we will see that, by establishing these points of disagreement, Armajani made a significant intervention into the broader field of post-war architectural theory.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Venturi and Scott Brown were far from alone in reassessing the legacy of modernist architecture.49 During the post-war


period, the International Style was popularized among architects and city planners across the world. With modernism rapidly becoming a hegemonic approach, critics became increasingly sceptical about its methods. However, although in this general sense Complexity and Contradiction can be seen as typical of its era, Venturi’s approach was not shared by all of his peers. Specifically, whereas he solely focused on issues of artistic form, other critics often took a much broader historical and political perspective. In 1972, for example, the American architectural theorist Colin Rowe argued that, while pre-war European modernism ‘was conceived as an adjunct of socialism and probably sprang from approximately the same ideological roots as Marxism’, in the post-war USA its stylistic developments had been separated from these political concerns.50 According to Rowe, modernism had gone from being an experimental avant-garde movement, which was deeply immersed in the leftist politics of its day, to effectively becoming the house style of international capitalism:

When, in the late 1940s, modern architecture became established and institutionalized, necessarily, it lost something of its original meaning … For, when modern architecture became proliferated throughout the world, when it became cheaply available, standardized and basic … necessarily there resulted a rapid devaluation of its ideal content. The intensity of its social vision became distanced. The building became no longer a subversive proposition about a possible Utopian future. It became instead the acceptable decoration of a certainly non-Utopian present … The scene was now ripe for the cheap politician and the commercial operator. The revolution had both succeeded and failed.51

Rowe’s account of modernism’s initial impetus resonates with my earlier discussion of Van Doesburg, which showed that, for him, the ‘difficult whole’ was always an immanently political idea as well as an aesthetic model. According to Rowe, this coupling of aesthetics and politics was dissolved in the post-war period, when all social content was removed from the modernist programme, leaving it as a set of technical procedures divorced from political critique.

A similar argument was made by the critic Kenneth Frampton in 1979. Frampton complained that architectural practice had recently been purged of all social considerations, with construction now being dictated purely by the demands of technical efficiency (or the optimization of profit margins) rather than users’ needs.52 His account contrasts sharply with discussions of technical standardization among pre-war modernists. While it is true that modernist architects did sometimes risk fetishizing industrial technologies, they also consistently presented standardization and efficiency as answers to social problems such as housing shortages and the poor living conditions of the urban working class. As Ross Wolfe has discussed, during the 1930s architects presented industrialization as the basis for offering citizens a ‘Minimum Dwelling’ – not a single model to which all must conform, but a certain basic standard of housing which would improve the conditions of the


masses, significantly reducing class inequalities.53 By the end of the 1970s, Frampton argued that such concerns had been removed from the modernist programme, leaving only the husk of pure technique. To put this differently, we might say that the political allegiance of modernism was effectively reversed. In 1973, the Italian architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri argued that modernists’ utopian ‘proposals for the organization of collective life’ had been integrated into the logic of capital, forming an ‘assembly line’ of standardized buildings, dictated by the ‘iron-clad laws of profit’.54

In this context it is easy to understand why Complexity and Contradiction dismissed the modernist tradition so readily, even ignoring those aspects which very closely resembled Venturi’s own project. While the historical factors discussed by Rowe, Frampton and others are never referenced in Complexity and Contradiction, they are tacitly acknowledged in the preface to the second edition of Learning from Las Vegas, which Venturi co-published with Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1977. Here the authors state: ‘Because we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intense admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution.’55 Indeed, their admiration for early modernists was so great that they even included ‘the early generations of Heroic Modern architects’ in a list of acknowledgements at the front of the book.56 Sardonic references to modernists as ‘heroic’ elsewhere in the text suggest that this dedication was more ambivalent than it might initially seem.57 Nonetheless, the point remains that Venturi was not actually rejecting modernism as a whole, but instead opposing ‘the Modern’ with a capital ‘M’ – modernist architecture in its newly institutionalized form. This was not clear in Complexity and Contradiction, which appeared to dismiss the entire modernist tradition.

Most importantly, Venturi’s analysis repeated and re-entrenched the depoliticization of modernism that had taken place during the post-war period. Whereas Rowe, Tafuri, Frampton, Scott Brown and others all bemoaned the destruction of architecture’s social aspirations which accompanied its reduction to dogmatic technicism, Venturi approached modernism and its possible successors from a solely aesthetic, intra-artistic perspective, eliding any political questions. Whereas Rowe called upon architects to renew the social concerns which were foregrounded by early modernists, throwing off established procedures and re-engaging with the needs evident in their own environments, in Complexity and Contradiction Venturi allowed this impetus to be forgotten, taking aesthetic diversity as an end in itself, with no concern for political consequences. Learning from Las Vegas later attacked what the authors called ‘technological voodooism’ – ‘the modernists’ fetishization of technology’ at the expense of other concerns.58 However, Complexity and Contradiction equally turns the aesthetic into an idol, severing it from its social context.

Earlier I noted that Venturi is often seen as a key progenitor of postmodernism. More broadly, among artists, writers and students who have not undertaken their own investigations of post-war architectural


theory, the debates of this period are most often framed in terms of a chronological transition from one paradigm to another. There is not sufficient space to address this fully here, but the above discussion should explain why Venturi’s writing has so often been seen as a step beyond or outside of the modernist tradition. In Complexity and Contradiction he argued that architects should leave modernism behind and take a new approach, replacing homogenization with diversity. Like Rowe, Armajani offered something very different. By politicizing the concept of the ‘difficult whole’ and approaching it through modernist techniques, he invited viewers to renew the potential of the historic avant-garde rather than abandoning it. Whereas Venturi’s reductive account of modernism served as a coda, closing it off to subsequent generations, Armajani presented the modernist tradition as itself a kind of ‘difficult whole’, with its own internal complexities and contradictions that deserve to be worked through.

Architecture from below: Armajani and class

Thoughout this article, I have argued that Armajani took on Venturi’s concept of the ‘difficult whole’ and re-politicized it, demonstrating its status as a social metaphor rather than just a mode of artistic composition. To reiterate this claim and provide a clearer sense of its consequences, I will conclude by examining Armajani’s relationship with the politics of class struggle.

Many of Armajani’s works were built using very simple carpentry techniques, which he adopted from studying the American vernacular tradition.59 These basic methods are always clearly evident in each finished piece, with nails and joints left on view. This approach is perhaps deployed most pointedly within the ‘portico’ of Red School House for Thomas Paine (fig. 8), which comprises not an ensemble of classical columns and pediments, but a simple post-and-lintel structure, totally lacking in academic credentials. Here Armajani spurns the refined techniques of the middle and upper classes, instead identifying with ordinary manual labourers.

To some extent, it can appear as if this reference to popular architectural practice brings Armajani close to Venturi. In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour also acknowledged the issue of class, calling on architects to incorporate popular iconography into their buildings. However, the differences between their approach and Armajani’s are far more significant than the similarities. Learning from Las Vegas argues that modernists had built ‘for Man rather than for people – this means … to suit their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to everyone’.60 Instead, the text argues, architects should adopt motifs from ‘Levittown-type’ suburbs (mass-produced, privately sold post-war housing developments) as a means of popularizing their work.61 This pronouncement is deeply problematic for several reasons, not least because the authors declared that, through their reference to suburban developments, they sought to reassert ‘the rights of the middle-middle class’ – a position which


they contrasted with ‘hard-hat politics’, a clear euphemism for working-class solidarity.62 In contrast, Armajani avoided the model of consumer populism represented by Levittown, in which standardized dwellings are sold to a popular audience by wealthy investors. Instead, via its reference to the vernacular, Red School House recalls older architectural practices through which commoners constructed homes for themselves, operating outside or at least on the edges of capital’s reach. In this sense, Red School House proposes something like a ‘people’s history’ of American architecture – a history from below which, rather than encouraging charitable conciliations towards the dispossessed, instead acknowledges their own agency as active subjects.

This difference is important because it demonstrates Armajani’s eagerness to produce the ‘difficult whole’ at the level of art’s social form, rather than just its aesthetic appearance. In some senses his use of vernacular technique seems to pull against the notion of the ‘difficult whole’, since it offers techniques that lack individual expression, instead evoking an anonymous collective. However, as well as being communally undertaken and socially learned, vernacular architecture also enables individuals to build their own homes instead of becoming beholden to architects and benefactors. In this sense it lays the ground for individual autonomy – a key condition for the realization of the difficult whole. In other words, it offers possibilities for constructing equality through social relationships, rather than just symbolic representation.

Armajani’s employment of the vernacular can also be understood as an investigation into the prehistory of modernism. In 2013, he acknowledged that various modernists including Le Corbuser were highly influenced by American industrial architecture, itself descending from the pragmatism of vernacular practice. As he stated, modernists were commonly drawn to the structural self-evidence that they found in American grain elevators.63 However, while industrial and vernacular practitioners simply used straightforward methods for reasons of functional expediency, Le Corbusier understood the basic compositions found in grain elevators as an example of what he called ‘primary forms’ – quasi-metaphysical, ‘universal’ shapes, which he equally located in ‘Egyptian, Greek or Roman architecture’.64 In other words, he thought that such forms have an ideal, self-generating significance, separate from their social context. In Red School House and various other works, Armajani reverses this by dissolving his references to modernist architecture within the techniques of vernacular practice. The specialized products made by modernist architects are thus reintegrated into popular history and, rather than solely being figured as a beneficiary of modern developments, the working class is acknowledged as a crucial historical agent.

As suggested earlier, Armajani’s emphasis on class as a major mode of social exclusion also complicated the fetishization of diversity found in Complexity and Contradiction. Whether or not we view Venturi himself as a postmodernist, postmodernists did maintain his elevation of difference into a totalizing demand and a universally applicable concept.65 Somewhat paradoxically, postmodernism fetishized difference, adopting it as a salve for


every situation, rather than addressing the particularity of varying contexts. During the post-war period, feminism and the black power movement rightly challenged the way in which women and people of colour had commonly been excluded from traditional working-class organizations, such as many trade unions. However, while this new emphasis on the intersectionality of oppression undoubtedly brought many positive consequences, Meiksins Wood notes that, once fetishized, the politics of diversity had the problematic consequence of blocking any attention to class domination whatsoever. Working-class agitation must inevitably aim to eradicate a certain form of difference – not particularity in general, but simply the gap between oppressed and oppressing classes.66

Armajani addresses this problem in his ‘reading’ and ‘meeting’ gardens. As in Learning from Las Vegas, there is a sense in which these works recall suburbia. As Nancy Princenthal has argued, the wooden partitions featured in Armajani’s gardens seem designed to evoke ‘picket fences’ – perhaps the key architectural trope in the American suburban imaginary.67 However, as noted in the introduction, rather than acting as welcoming openings into a domesticated space, Armajani’s fences often serve as barriers, separating one area from another and sometimes even totally blocking off parcels of land, with no gate to enable entry. Here Levittown becomes a system of exclusions.

Such fenced-off spaces form a common trope in Armajani’s practice, also appearing in Office for Four (1981) and other works. As well as evoking suburbia, they carry another historical resonance, recalling the enclosures of common land that have drastically altered the spatial organization of nations across the world since the early modern period. As Marx argued, these acts of ‘primitive accumulation’ privatized what was formerly communal space, creating a large population of landless people, with no means of providing for themselves – precisely those who subsequently became the individualized wage labourers of the working class, forced to sell their labour to capitalist employers in order to make a living.68 By combining Venturi’s preferred popular icon with this subtle reference to a history of disempowerment and exploitation, Armajani reminds us that the difference constituting the stratification of social classes is nothing to be celebrated.

While Armajani constantly creates these subtle reminders of class oppression, he also finds hope in the form of popular agency, which he champions in opposition to the reign of the capitalist and the specialist. By recalling attempts to produce the ‘difficult whole’ within the field of vernacular practice, which long predate the work of modernists and postmodernists alike, Armajani treats this concept not as the invention of individual artists or theorists, but instead as a demand made by the masses. Acknowledging the individual autonomy which can be enabled by communal organization, he insists that collectivity and liberty need not be antitheses and can instead be mutually reinforcing. Against the detractors of ‘hard-hat politics’, Armajani thus places his faith in the people themselves. Faced with the competitive individualization promoted by both capital and the canon, he seeks liberation in a form of autonomous practice, which individuals learn


and share together. Here he seeks the ‘difficult whole’ not in aesthetics, but in social form. As Armajani put it with typically pithy humour in 2013, public art should ‘become art for all of the people. Pedagogies like art as self-exploration and self expression – I hate that. As soon as somebody says “I’m trying to express myself,” I have to take a bus.’69

1. Janet Kardon, ‘Architecture/sculpture: subject, verb, object’, in Siah Armajani: Bridges, Houses, Communal Spaces, Dictionary For Building (exh. cat.), Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1986, p. 33.

2. Nancy Princenthal, ‘Master builder’, Art in America, 74, 3, 1986, p. 132.

3. Siah Armajani, ‘Manifesto: public sculpture in the context of American democracy’, Art Suisse, February 1996, p. 78.

4. See, for example, Calvin Tomkins, ‘Open, available, useful’, The New Yorker, 19 March 1990, pp. 49–70.

5. On Armajani calling himself a sculptor, see Hans Ulrich Obrist, interview with Siah Armajani, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2012, https://vimeo.com/53599164 (accessed 19 November 2015).

6. Siah Armajani, ‘Interview with Linda Shearer’, in Young American Artists: 1978 Exxon National Exhibition (exh. cat.), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1978, pp. 14–15.

7. Kardon, as at note 1, p. 35.8. Armajani, as at note 6, pp. 16–17. 9. Ibid., p. 17.10. Siah Armajani, ‘The glass

porch for Walter Benjamin’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 2, 2002, p. 368.

11. Armajani, as at note 6, p. 14.12. See, for example, Fredric

Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, July–August 1984, pp. 54, 80; Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 55–62. For Venturi on postmodernism, see Robert Venturi, ‘A bas postmodernism, of course’, in Pelagia Goulimari (ed.), Postmodernism: What Moment?, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 19–21.

13. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New

York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966, p. 52.

14. Ibid., p. 24.15. Ibid., p. 29.16. Ibid., p. 89.17. Ibid., pp. 89, 23.18. Ibid., p. 86. This is a quotation

from the architect Aldo Van Eyk, approvingly cited by Venturi.

19. Armajani, as at note 6, p. 14.20. For example, see Venturi, as at

note 13, p. 24.21. Denise Scott Brown, ‘On Pop

Art, permissiveness and planning’, in Having Words, London, Architectural Association, 2009, p. 58. Scott Brown began collaborating with Venturi in the early 1960s and to a large extent they have shared an architectural and theoretical project. To my knowledge Armajani has never cited her as an influence, instead always referring to Venturi alone. However, given her crucial role in the formation of Venturi’s ideas, she could arguably be seen as equally significant for the development of Armajani’s practice.

22. Ibid., p. 59.23. David Hodge, ‘Ante-chambers

for a public to come: the critical art of Siah Armajani’, Siah Armajani, Tehran, Bong-Gah Publications, forthcoming.

24. Valérie Mavridorakis, ‘From Armajani to Sacco and Vanzetti’, in Siah Armajani: An Ingenious World (exh. cat.), Parasol Unit, London, 2013, p. 56.

25. Obrist and Armajani, as at note 5.

26. Princenthal, as at note 2, p. 132.27. Venturi, as at note 13, p. 47.28. This anecdote was related

by Simon Beeson, who worked as Armajani’s assistant during the 1990s.

29. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1867, Part 3, Chapter 9, section 1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch09.htm (accessed 12 August 2016).

30. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, Cambridge, Cambridge Univerity Press, 1995, pp. 258–59.

31. Kardon, as at note 1, p. 27.32. Ibid.33. Ibid.34. Michael White, De Stijl and

Dutch Modernism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 2.

35. Robert Berlind, ‘Armajani’s open-ended structures’, Art in America, 67, 6, 1979, p. 84.

36. See Lenneke Büller and Frank Den Oudsten, ‘Interview with Truss Schröder’, in The Rietveld Schröder House, London, Butterworth Architecture, 1988, p. 56.

37. White, as at note 34, p. 131.38. Richard Padovan, Towards

Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies, and De Stijl, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 140.

39. Ibid.40. Theo Van Doesburg, Principles

of Neo-Plastic Art, London, Lund Humphries, 1969, p. 39.

41. Ibid., p. 40. Emphasis added.42. Theo Van Doesburg, ‘Towards

a plastic architecture’, in Hans L. C. Jaff, De Stijl, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970, p. 187.

43. Ibid. Emphasis added.44. Padovan, as at note 38, p. 97.45. Peter Bürger, Theory of

the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

46. Theo Van Doesburg, ‘Defending the spirit of space: against a dogmatic functionalism’, in Theo Van Doesburg: On European Architecture, Basel, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990, p. 91.

47. Padovan, as at note 38, p. 24.48. Ibid.49. One extremely useful

collection of texts in this area is K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998.

50. Colin Rowe, ‘Introduction to five architects’, in Hays, as at note 49, pp. 75–76.

51. Ibid., pp. 74–75.52. Kenneth Frampton, ‘The status

of Man and the status of his objects’, in Hays, as at note 49, p. 370.

53. See Ross Wolfe, ‘The sociohistoric mission of modernist

architecture’, The Charnel House, 20 September 2011, http://thecharnelhouse.org/2011/09/20/the-sociohistoric-mission-of-modernist-architecture-the-housing-shortage-the-urban-proletariat-and-the-liberation-of-woman/ (accessed 24 September 2015).

54. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1976, pp. 100–01.

55. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, rev. edn, 1977, p. xiii.

56. Ibid., p. xii.57. See, for example, ibid., p. 148.58. Ibid., p. 150.59. Janet Kardon, ‘Siah Armajani,

American observer and visionary’, in Siah Armajani: An Ingenious World (exh. cat.), Parasol Unit, London, 2013, p. 66.

60. Venturi et al., as at note 55, p. 154.

61. Ibid., pp. 154–55.62. Ibid., p. 155. Also problematic is

their statement that the aesthetics of Levittown suburbs could adequately represent ‘black as well as white’. This is strongly contradicted by the fact that African Americans have always been under-represented in these communities, not least because some were initially only open to white residents. See Peter Bacon Hales, ‘Levittown’s palimpsest: colored skin’, in Outside the Gates of Eden, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 113–20.

63. Kardon, as at note 59, p. 66.64. Le Corbusier, Towards a

New Architecture, London, Dover Publications, 1986, p. 29.

65. Meiksins Wood, as at note 30.66. Ibid.67. Princenthal, as at note 2, p. 131.68. See Marx, as at note 29,

Part 7, Chapter 26, ‘The secret of primitive accumulation’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm (accessed 12 August 2016).

69. Siah Armajani, lecture at Parasol Unit, London, 19 September 2013.

david hodge the difficult whole: siah armajani, robert venturi...

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