IAUS: An Insider's Memoir

Resembling a think tank dedicated to research, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies developed into a school-like International clearing house in its heyday, purportedly between 1974 and 1980.  Although it was most active during these latter years, when it attracted a larger number of researchers and a considerable audience, its commitment to urbanism flourished in the early years and its strength in education continued until its demise.

In this book I will describe and analyze the documents the Institute published and the activities in which it was involved, and discuss its standing in the architectural world.  It is more of a personal memoir than a definitive, scholarly study, though I will discuss many of the ideas and ideologies of the Institute.  I may not have been a central player, but I was a good observer and researcher and as such got elected to the Institute’s Fellowship.  The first chapter is a series of five vignettes in chronological order, placing the Institute in the context of historical sequence.  The subsequent chapters focus on Institute activities and publications, including its research in urbanism which brought me into the fold (chapter 2); its journal, Oppositions (chapter 3); its educational and public programs which I as librarian partook of (chapter 4); its newspaper, Skyline (chapter 5); and its exhibitions with attendant catalogues (chapter 6).  The concluding chapter, on prevailing dialectic methodology, will attempt to sum up the theoretical grounding that informed the Institute’s philosophy.  Finally, there will be three appendices: 27 interviews or accounts by key Institute players will appear, adding a human face to the narrative; two an approximate plan of the Institute’s space at 8 West 40^th Street by Scott Brandi, and three Frederieke Taylor’s so-far unpublished survey of the Institute’s rich exhibition involvement.

It is my belief that by showing and telling what went on at the Institute, it is possible to convey to readers a vivid idea of its purposes and accomplishments.  I leave a study of the Institute according to Peter Eisenman’s archives at the Canadian Center for Architecture to Kim Förster, Sylvia Lavin, and Lucia Allais.  My memoir covers the range of years from start to finish (1967-1985) relying on my own perceptions from 1970 to 1982, on other Institute members’ accounts and archives from before and after those dates, and on secondary sources which I found or were referred to me by the 40-odd people I interviewed.

Before launching  into a detailed “insider’s” historical narrative, which will be the focus of the forthcoming chapters, it will be useful at first to examine a selection of critical articles written about the IAUS from the perspective of British, French, and American observers.  Outsiders’ opinions taken from interviews also figure in giving an idea of how the Institute was perceived.  The first article on the IAUS, published in the British journal New Society just a month after its birth, came from the pen of none less than Reyner Banham, a renowned critic/historian in the United Kingdom.  Fast-forward 16 years to 1983, in the twilight of the Institute, when the American writer and editor Peter Lemos wrote a thoughtful commentary for New York’s Village Voice just as the IAUS was moving down to Union Square from its idyllic headquarters on 40^th Street.  These articles will be supplemented by others, such as opinions garnered from the French journal, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and from more recent personal accounts.  Andrew MacNair, a key figure in this story, has said that basing a story on such word-of-mouth contributions constitutes a kind of biblical or mythological thread.

In his article, “Vitruvius over Manhattan,” Banham ruminated on one of the Institute’s insignia mentioned earlier, the Mannerist version of the Vitruvian man by Cesariano (1521) (figure 6) in describing the arty approach the Institute was taking.  Writing of “The New City,” a Museum of Modern Art exhibition on Harlem that had been organized by Peter Eisenman and Arthur Drexler (then director of the design department of MoMA) just after the Institute’s inaugural in November 1967, Banham correctly pointed out a certain predilection for inherent formal qualities in the exhibition.  However, the formalism of which Banham wrote became complemented by theory.  Banham was critical of the formalism; he found it somewhat naïve to expect well-designed urban form to transform its people.  Thus:  “They look to the city of good form, before the city of good men—but probably believing that the good form will breed good men, that a city which makes itself visually clear will become clear in other senses too.”  To dismiss such thinking outright belies the powerful prose of John Ruskin among others….