Ontology of Construction.

This is a slim but heavy volume. Gevork Hartoonian, a visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas, is one of those historian/theorists who believe that something terrible happened to Western architecture about 200 years ago. In this view, some kind of fatal rupture occurred, the ancient Classical tradition was drained of all existential meaning and its place was taken by the cold, inhuman apparatus of science and technology. But Hartoonian has a problem. All this has been said before by his academic confreres and after a while bemoaning the loss of meaning in Western architecture becomes a bore.

So to establish his academic credentials (this collection of essays is his first book) Hartoonian has to take a new tack. He has decided, therefore, that the 'secularisation' of architecture and construction might not after all be such a bad thing. Since the forces of modernity are evidently unstoppable, perhaps it would be a good idea to come to terms with them by formulating a new theory to fit the new conditions and point the way forward. Post-Modernism was one such theory, but that turned out to be a rather shallow affair and was quickly discredited. Hartoonian therefore proposes an alternative. He calls it 'montage' and he finds intellectually respectable roots for it in the writings of the nineteenth-century German theorist, Gottfried Semper. Semper's idea was that architecture should be seen not as a single discipline but as a kind of ad hoc assemblage of techniques and sensibilities from four distinct 'industries': ceramics, carpentry, masonry and weaving. According to Hartoonian: 'Semper thus anticipates the predicament of logocentrism and opens a "spatiality" through which architecture could be loosed from the ground of historicism to become subject to the dynamics of secularisation. That opening, interestingly enough, resonates with the spatial transparencies that are perceptible in the screen of mass media technology'. Quite. In other words, Semper was a kind of proto-post structuralist.

The theory of montage (if it can be said to be a theory) is expounded in the first essay in the book. The other essays are basically justifications of the theory by reference to the work of architects like Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn, who all turn out, unsurprisingly, to be montagists to a greater or lesser degree. It is an interesting and basically simple idea but it is unlikely to have any influence on practising architects as long as it remains entangled in the kind of contorted academic prose that, sadly and frustratingly, is de rigueur for this kind of book.