Architecture and Feminism.

Some inspired TV producer should make every effort to get the authors of this fall's major architecture releases a guest spot on a daytime talk show because they've got a lot to chat about. Such is the way in the heady realm of theory-inflected architecture scholarship - more than a few fistfights are bound to break out, some scripted, some spontaneous. With subject matter ranging from feminism to fear to fear of feminism, architectural theory reveals itself once again ready and willing to reexamine the way it understands its own object of study. At worst this tendency results in navel gazing, at best in highly original hybrid forms of writing that locate new modes of public address for architects and critics.

Any book that announces itself as a fresh interdisciplinary approach to tired academic conventions nonetheless risks putting forth an authoritarian epistemology. Such is the case with Architecture of Fear, a collection that couldn't be more timely - bombed-out buildings regularly become spectacular front-page photos nowadays - or more ill conceived. Peter Marcuse's historical overview of fortified towns leads to the stunning conclusion that contemporary gated communities are bad. Ditto for Steven Flusty's analysis of spatial exclusions in contemporary Los Angeles (which divides space into five categories - "stealthy," "slippery," "crusty," "prickly," and "jittery") and Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder's empirical study of gated communities. Nobody deals with them conceptually (a doorman building as a gated community, for instance), nor does anyone care to consider the important psychoanalytic aspects of architectures of fear - that is, fear that takes the form of spatial anxiety. Such a perspective would shed light on the fearful contemporary city dweller rather than simply lament the civitas-destroying forces at work on the contemporary built environment.

Architecture of Fear's conceptual shortcomings can be traced to its editor's embarrassing introductory essay. Nan Ellin presents an overview of modern fear and modern urbanism that skates over questionable secondary sources as if they are solid fact, effectively lumping all cultural constructions of modern fear onto a transhistorical bourgeoisie. Vague pronouncements like "More recently . . . the city has become associated with danger rather than safety" can't even begin to locate the shifting sites of media-induced public fear - from downtowns overrun by homos to backwater burgs infested with homegrown militia. Like many architecture scholars who attempt cultural criticism, Ellin ultimately comes across as a hermeneutical wet blanket; her diagnosis of contemporary media culture dismisses everything from Nick at Nite to distressed denim as escapist nostalgic fantasy that contributes to "the virtual eclipse of the public realm."

If Architecture of Fear is symptomatic of the limitations of Marxist urban geography as practiced by the disciples of David Harvey and Mike Davis, then Rosalyn Deutsche's Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics presents a sustained, thoughtful challenge to this way of understanding the city. This collection spans Deutsche's development as an urban theorist over the past decade, from her October essays on the relationship between public art and homelessness in New York City, to her highly original feminist critique of the interdisciplinary alliance between Jamesonian postmodernism and Marxist geography, to a more recent turn toward a radical democratic spatial politics articulated in the concluding essay "Agoraphobia." The book's title refers both to literal evictions of homeless people from public spaces and discursive exclusions of whole schools of thought - notably feminism and multiculturalism - from dominant theories of public space. "Exclusions are justified, naturalized, and hidden by representing social space as a fundamental unity that must be protected from conflict, heterogeneity, and particularity." Deutsche argues that conflict is the constitutive condition of democratic public space, not its ruin.

As a collection of reprints tied to the cultural moments of their production, Evictions holds up well. Though "Uneven Development" (1988) sounds a bit art school in its analysis of the production of homelessness (given the way AIDS has since transformed the face of homelessness), it remains perhaps the most sophisticated appraisal of Henri Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city," which Deutsche strategically recasts as "the right to difference." And "Chinatown: Part Four?" her response to Davis' City of Quartz, troubles the too-easy distinction between urban fictions like film noir and those produced by professional urban theorists; in so doing, she opens up a much larger project - careful scrutiny of the trappings of masculine urban subjectivity and masculinist rhetoric - that promises to generate critical scholarship for years to come.

Feminism secures its place on architecture's map with two other major releases: Architecture and Feminism and The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. The former title seems grandiose, perhaps better suited to a journal (as this Yale-based project was originally conceived), which would allow the terms to renegotiate each other over a span of several years. The editors' introduction acutely addresses feminism's uneven development as a term - absorbed almost too quickly in the academy for its institutional critiques to register, approached with suspicion, even hostility, in architecture offices. The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, meanwhile, blurs the line between theorists and practitioners, noting that many women architects have staged their careers as theorists in the past decade. If The Architect offers the academy as a valuable site for the development of a feminist practice, Architecture and Feminism responds by questioning academic hermeticism.

Two standout essays frame Architecture and Feminism's agenda: Deborah Fausch's "Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History - Toward a Feminist Architecture" and Mary McLeod's "Everyday and 'Other' Spaces." Fausch painstakingly derives the concept of strategic essentialism, independent of Gayatri Spivak's formulation, taking care to anticipate how it risks lapsing into essentialism. McLeod's essay is less nuanced and ultimately more problematic. She is right to point out that deconstruction entered architecture in the '80s in a way that reinforced rather than destabilized gender hierarchies, but her sweeping judgment call overlooks deconstructive methods that have been so central to feminist practices, evident in nearly every contribution to The Architect.

Still, "Everyday and 'Other' Spaces" provides a valuable critical perspective for anyone patient enough to assemble the word puzzle known as Chora L. Works. An architectural version of Madonna's Truth or Dare, this "book" gives the complete correspondences between Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida, who collaborated together on the Chora L Works, originally intended to be one of the artistic interventions for Bernard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette in Paris. The built project never came about, but it did generate a ton of paperwork - Derrida's "Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books" in both French and English, various seminars in which the word "chora" is endlessly deconstructed, faxes, drawings, etc. - all of which is bound together, complete with holes punched out on every page (replicating the point-grid scheme Derrida and Eisenman planned to use for the project, which refers to Tschumi's point-grid at La Villette, which refers to Eisenman's unbuilt point-grid in Canareggio, Venice, which refers . . .). This text is perversely interesting: for all its talk about the death of the author, the authors simply won't go away. Chora L Works nevertheless amounts to an important historical document of a particular wrinkle in time when a particular deconstructionist philosopher and a particular deconstructivist architect convinced each other of certain basic tenets of postmodern literary theory. Most hilarious moment: Derrida pitching a fit at Eisenman for being a control freak over the design, which leads the philosopher to exclaim, "What is needed is some heterogeneity. Something impossible to integrate into the scheme." - as if heterogeneity can be ordered from a supply catalogue.

As an object, however, Chora L Works pushes the boundaries of contemporary architecture culture. Rarely does a project expose its conceptual production process so nakedly, and the idea of turning a book into a site indicates more than shameless self-promotion at work: Chora L Works proposes a new, specifically architectural way of presenting information. The essays in The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, meanwhile, exceed the conventions of architectural writing. Architecture culture may just have arrived at the point - following a sustained immersion in imported critical theory that generated reams of tortured prose - where its more sophisticated expositors can produce informed prose that is, of all things, a pleasure to read. Beatriz Colomina's "Battle Lines: E.1027" weaves history and riot grrrl anger together in her powerful account of Le Corbusier's perverse attempts to defile Eileen Gray's modernist villa and erase her name from architecture's canon. In "Bad Press," Elizabeth Diller turns tired Deleuzian architectural rhetoric on folding inside-out as she generously samples from housewives' manuals on ironing. And a therapeutic "Nature Morte" has Jennifer Bloomer interrupting her analysis of gender hierarchies in the architecture academy to insert blocks of autobiography of a younger Bloomer internalizing those hierarchies in design school. Each of these essayists pays careful attention to the poetics of construction of writing. What we're witnessing is not architecture's belated attempt at ecriture feminine but rather a culturally specific - and exciting - ecriture architecturale.

Ernest Pascucci is senior editor at ANY magazine and a frequent contributor to Artforum.