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Authors
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Abstract(s)
This paper assesses the influence of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) on Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York City. Founded in 1967, the Institute was a ‘think tank,’ a school, and a site for public discourse, criticized by Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri for having ‘something too European about it.’ Tafuri’s statement serves as a foundation to analyze the IAUS’s complicated relationship to European modernism, by assessing some of the varied projects and groups associated with the Institute. Eisenman’s Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE), for example, began in the mid-1960s as a series of meetings on contemporary architectural concerns – in some ways an American counterpart to the earlier CIAM (although Eisenman had actually envisioned CASE as more of a ‘Team 10-like group’). Members of the IAUS were splintered in their positions on architecture’s responsibility to political, social, and aesthetic issues, which prompted the founding of ReVisions, a group formed within the auspices of the IAUS in 1981 that focused on architecture’s thorny relationship to political ideology. This paper addresses the neglected role of ReVisions and women members, topics which have been long neglected in the historiography of the IAUS. A study of the IAUS illustrates the complex influence of CIAM on the direction of architectural intellectualism in New York in the wake of 1968, which is instructive for engaged architects and intellectuals working in the United States today.
Description
This paper is based in part on a chapter in the author’s recently published Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Lauretta Vinciarelli in Context: Transatlantic Dialogues in Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, and Theory, 1968-2007,’ The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2018. The author would like to thank her dissertation committee for their feedback at various stages of the writing process: Dr. Mona Hadler, Dr. John Maciuika, Dr. Marta Gutman, and Dr. Joan Ockman
Keywords
IAUS Peter Eisenman CASE Team 10 architectural theory
Citation
SIEFERT, Rebecca – An American Think Tank with ‘Something too European About it’. Theory, Politics, and Feminism at the IAUS in New York in REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION. Debates, proposals and intellectual framework. Porto: CEAA/ESAP-CESAP, 2019, p. 287-299