Shock or comfort?

THE FAMILIAR AND THE UNFAMILIAR IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE

By Jean La Marche. Champaign: University of lllinois Press. 2003, $34,95

This is a book about the architectural 'subject', defined as 'the person that architects imagine experiencing their architecture'. The subject used to be thought of as an individual with a single, unchanging identity. He or she was, for example, either a he or a she, and usually a he. Now the subject has become more complicated. It can be singular or plural, of uncertain gender, its identity unstable as it struggles with all the contradictions of modern life. The subject has also become a subject in the other sense of an area of academic enquiry. Jean La Marche refers at one point to 'the importance of subject research in architecture' and obviously intends his book to be a contribution to the furtherance of that research.

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La Marche's main interest is in the subject's capacity to be shocked (or stimulated) by the unfamiliar, and comforted (or bored) by the familiar. Twentieth-century architects can be divided into those that tried to shock and those that tried to comfort. Early modernists like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier used unfamiliar forms to shock their subjects into an awareness of the strangeness of modern life and help them to come to terms with it. Later in the twentieth century, Aldo Rossi tried to recover traditional forms that everyone could live with, while Venturi, Scott Brown Associates made an architecture out of the familiar images of popular culture. The trouble was, of course, that the intentions were usually misinterpreted. Corb's strangeness seemed merely personal, Rossi's familiar forms looked disturbingly surreal, and VSBA's populism was all too obviously elitism in disguise. Only Wright managed to tune in to his subject's unspoken desires and make the unfamiliar familiar. The lack of communication between architects and their subjects is surely the most important aspect of 'subject research'. La Marche does not emphasize it, however, preferring instead to submit familiar buildings and familiar texts to a straightforward, slightly plodding analysis. This book is short, easy to understand and thought provoking but rather unadventurous, drawing its raw material only from the established architectural canon. It might have benefited from more unfamiliar examples.