THE ANAESTHETICS OF ARCHITECTURE.

Any book advertised in its introduction as controversial creates certain expectations. Most of Neil Leach's long essay The Anaesthetics of Architecture -- promising locution -- is simply a post-Baudrillardian drift through the well-explored territory of the aestheticized sign -- that 'effacement of depth' -- and its anaesthetic consequences for culture. Leach is pretty good at rehashing this depressing trajectory from flaneur to couch potato. He's less good on architecture. Easy targets (Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, theory-envious London undergraduates and their misguided prof) are dispatched in non-controversial fashion. In his most potentially controversial moment, Leach does call Leb Woods a fascist, but this comes only via an uncharitable conflation of false consciousness and bad faith. (Leach is forever praising people for their 'noble intentions' before blowing them down.) Unfortunately, Leach is so focused on the thing, he is blinded to its effects, seduced by the (lavishly illustrated) images he decries into a focus too narrow. What harm (save to the standard of taste) does the National Gallery addition actually do compared to, say, Beverly Hills 90210?

Neil Leach. London: MIT Press. 1999. [pounds]10.50

I certainly had the sense that some private score-settling was going on here, though I can only begin to imagine the fault line between the Architecture and Critical Theory Programme at Nottingham (of which Leach is the director) and those misguided formalists at the Bartlett. Disturbed by the arbitrariness of the signifier and the promiscuity of its attachments, Leach longs for functionalist certainties, reliable meanings, and a politics that does some good in the world, even if he marginalizes his desire and dilutes his point by the too-arcane objects of his fixation.