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DORITA HANNAH Massey University OMAR KHAN University of Buffalo (SUNY) The pairing of the two words ‘‘performance’’ and ‘‘architecture’’ separated by an oblique dash (also referred to as a virgule or solidus) is a means to recognize that each field holds itself apart from the other in mutual tension. The performative gesture of this simple slash also reflects the creative relationship between the two: both interruptive and inclusive, it ‘‘plays’’ between the fluid and the solid, the dynamic and the static—performance and architecture. In 1967, Jacques Derrida aligned this active role in punctuation to ‘‘spacing,’’ which ‘‘speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.’’1 For Derrida, punctuation enacts its own performative utterances, designating not only the interval but also ‘‘a ‘productive,’ ‘genetic,’ ‘practical’ movement, an ‘operation,’ if you will.’’2 In this special theme issue, through a range of scholarly articles, design projects, reviews, and an interview, we have attempted to recognize the interval that exists between the two while projecting the ways in which architecture and performance engage one another. Almost two decades after establishing the spatiotemporal in language through punctuation, Derrida went on to propose the notion of architectural performativity, whereby architecture is ‘‘the event of spacing.’’3 Spacing becomes an architectural act for the designer formulating architecture and for the inhabitant experiencing it. This spatial performativity, as ‘‘the provocation of an event,’’ specifically references J.L. Austin’s ‘‘performative’’ in How to Do Things with Words, where Austin establishes the dynamic nature of ‘‘speech acts’’ that expand beyond language into action itself.4 Within the illocutionary act of speech, something is being done through the saying, constituting action itself. Within the spatial act of architecture, something is being done through the construction, constituting inhabitation itself. Simone Brott’s article, ‘‘Close Encounter, Withdrawn Effects,’’ takes up this spatial acting out in relation to architectural subjectivity as a perfor- Introduction Performance/Architecture mative effect. Using a variety of filmic examples and Rem Koolhaas’s Prada store in New York, the author suggests an alternative ontology of the architectural surface, wherein objects and subjects produce one another through an unmediated effect. In a different way, the design projects of J. Meejin Yoon look at architecture’s acting out through interactive installations in public space. Here, architecture, outfitted with sound, light, and real-time interactive technologies, actively constructs spaces that encourage new forms of public participation. In the same year Derrida was formulating his theory of linguistic ‘‘spacing,’’ Progressive Architecture magazine published a special issue on ‘‘Performance Design’’ that examined ‘‘in depth the new problem-solving methodology of systems analysis and its implications for the practice of architecture.’’5 This focus on building science as a diagnostic tool emerged after the Second World War in response to a need to rerationalize and codify functionalism in architecture. The quantifiable workings of buildings in relation to their energy use, general operations, and maintenance costs framed the performance of architecture as a problem that could be measured and solved. Implicated in modernism’s ongoing utopian project, it aimed at improving quality of life through the benefits of rationalizing ‘‘high-performance’’ materials and environments. While concerns with optimization have remained central in the engineering sciences, recent architectural publications have attempted to align the more pragmatic concerns of building science with architecture’s aesthetic considerations.6 In ‘‘Extraordinary Performances at the Salk Institute,’’ Kiel Moe reexamines Louis Kahn’s laboratory complex across a range of performance criteria. His argument centers on the pipe space and its adaptability in support of sustained bench work. Moe asserts that this space not only supports the lab’s efficient performance of services but also may be a more articulate representation of Kahn’s Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 4–5 ª 2008 ACSA notion of ‘‘beauty.’’ Rodrigo Tisi takes up this conflation of the banal with the remarkable as a more comprehensive approach to architecture through his pedagogical practice in Chile. By combining pragmatic requirements, Tisi outlines six critical elements of body, surface, program, time, place, and materials that students integrate to create full-scale models that encourage public interaction. The case for architectural performativity can also be found in discourses that are not specific to architecture, in Erving Goffman’s theatrical framing of the everyday in which environments are stagemanaged through a social dramaturgy. It can also be discussed in relation to Richard Schechner’s model of performance as ‘‘restored’’ or ‘‘twicebehaved behavior,’’ where built space could be called ‘‘twice-constructed constructions,’’ incorporating physical and societal structures that form and concretize social action through tectonic form.7 This reinforces Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘‘space as practiced place’’ achieved through the ‘‘theatre of operations.’’8 These concepts elucidate architecture’s role of normalizing behavior through its spatial gestures and encoding. Yet, an understanding of such regulatory signs can be used to challenge spatial occupation through individual and collective performances that undermine normative behavior. As an aesthetic practice, performance provides a means of critiquing architecture and testing alternative strategies outside the exigencies and politics of building. Chris Mills reviews the recent retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and how his radical actions of demolition, vandalism, and destabilization commented on the failed architectural policies of the 1970s. Ephemeral structures become ‘‘effective’’ and ‘‘affective’’ architectures as outlined by Beth Weinstein in her article on Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand and the entourage of high-profile architects with whom he collaborates to create performances in found INTRODUCTION 4 spaces and formal theaters. Weinstein focuses on projects created in partnership with Diller 1 Scofidio, Jean Nouvel, and Thom Mayne to highlight the mutual obsessions and constructive resistances between dance and architecture. Ronit Eisenbach also explores the intersection of dance and architecture as a means of constructing pedagogy. Collaborating with two choreographers, she documents an interdisciplinary performance laboratory in which graduate and undergraduate students improvised space through gesture, rhythm, and movement. Performance and architecture find their mutual site in theater auditoria where performance is literally housed. These auditoria bring together theater as art form, fleeting acts of dramatic practice that use ephemeral materials and disposable elements, and theater as built form, a stable environment conceived to persist beyond the events it houses. Although perceived as the most expressive and creative of sites, theaters tend to be mired in regulations and preconceived expectations that often foreclose architectural innovation, limiting typological expression. In Minneapolis, two significant theater venues, Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater and Herzog and de Meuron’s McGuire Theatre in the Walker Art Center, were recently completed. John Comazzi and Margaret Werry discuss these from the differing perspectives of architecture and performance, respectively. The generally regulatory and predictable nature of auditorium architecture often leads to a desire to un-house theater and let it wander, contaminating other sites that are in turn folded into its fictional realm. This encourages the practices of architecture, scenography, and theatrical 5 HANNAH AND KHAN performance to negotiate each other in ways that can be mutually provocative and productive. In ‘‘Out of Site: Haworth Tompkins, Paul Brown and the ‘Shoreditch Shakespeares’,’’ Juliet Rufford discusses the complex temporality specific to sites that blend the fictive with the real. Her article outlines how architect, designer, and director collaborated to produce two of Shakespeare’s history plays in an industrial building slated for demolition in London (2000). The inherent ephemerality in the building’s lack of futurity became an opportunity to create a productive engagement between the art forms in ways that are rarely seen in the more ‘‘proper’’ places for performance. Perhaps the architect who is most identified with performance is Bernard Tschumi. His writing is frequently cited by scholars in this issue, and that prompted an interview into his current thinking on the topic. Tschumi is credited with the term ‘‘eventspace’’ (another punctuated pairing of performance and architecture), which was first established and developed in the 1970s when he began teaching at the Architectural Association in London. His association with curator RoseLee Goldberg, whose focus lay in performance art, is documented and discussed by Sandra Kaji-O‘Grady in the last of the scholarship of design articles. Kaji-O’Grady presents a historic snapshot of the ‘‘London Conceptualists,’’ a loose collection of artists and architects that was inaugurated through the lowbudget exhibition, A Space: A Thousand Words, cocurated in 1978 by Tschumi and Goldberg. However, as Tschumi explains in the interview, he does not believe in collaboration, nor for that matter in separating and defining disciplines. He is much more interested in how the two influence one another in the joint problem of activating space. It is unclear whether any separation can be maintained across practices as technologies and instrumentalities become increasingly shared. Or for that matter, whether disciplinary boundaries will reassert themselves to ‘‘clarify’’ meaning. What is most encouraging is the prodigious work that is resulting from this particular pairing. Acknowledgments Our gratitude to the peer reviewers who gave freely of their time and advice: Rebecca Sinclair (Massey University), Sven Mehzoud (Massey University), Sarah Treadwell (University of Auckland), Charles Walker (Auckland University of Technology), Jon McKenzie (University of Wisconsin—Madison), Kathleen Irwin (University of Regina), Joyce Hwang (University at Buffalo), Mark Shepard (University at Buffalo), Hadas Steiner (University at Buffalo), and Sergio Lopez-Piniero (University at Buffalo). Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 68. 2. Jacques Derrida, Positions, Alan Bass, trans. (London: Continuum Press, 1997), p. 76. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Point de Folie—Maintenant l’Architecture,’’ in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 335. 4. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 8. 5. ‘‘Performance Design,’’ Progressive Architecture 48 (August 1967): 105–53. 6. Branko Kolarevic and Ali Malkawi, Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality (New York: Routledge, 2005); M. Wigginton and J. Harris, Intelligent Skins (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002); and Leonard Bachman, Integrated Building: The Systems Basis of Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2002). 7. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 36. 8. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 117, 145–46.