Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde

摘要

The similarities between these two volumes—both small, compact offerings by The MIT Press—are striking because they set off how different are the intellectual worlds occupied by these authors, and in turn ask us to imagine what this difference means for contemporary theory. Both authors are enormously influential, powerful thinkers, and the opportunity to see them in simultaneous action is thoroughly provocative. But to start with the similarities. Both Michael K. Hays and Pier Vittorio Aureli take seriously and analyse the critical nature of architectural autonomy, 'critical' in the sense that its overt retreat from a modernist, social engagement should be understood not as a cop-out, but as a self-conscious positioning in late capitalism and the aftermath of modernism's failure in the face of late capitalism.