After Architecture: A Conversation

Abstract

In 1966 Architecture Principe, group of French architects and artists led by Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, published series of manifestos in an eponymous journal. Now reissued in book form with an English translation,' these texts allow us to consider more closely paradoxical itinerary that has led urbanplanner-turned-philosopher Paul Virilio from an unsettling conception of architectural space to an even more relativistic vision, collapsing space with temporality of new technologies of communication (tele-presence). that was at center of early architectural researchan architecture of inclined planes and complex topologies-was calculated response to crisis group saw affecting all human activity and threatening to bring about the mutation of mankind. Flooded with exchangeable images and material signs, individuals had become consumers obsessed with comfort and status. worst scenarios hallucinated by modernists of 1920s and 1930s had become muffled reality. For Architecture Principe, function of obliquity was to tear consumers from their neutrality by inducing in them what they called a state of refusal and repulsion. Instead of merely housing uprooted dwellings containing obstacles such as curves, ramps, and planes inclined to varying degrees would throw him into action. The natural dynamic of this situation, Virilio concluded, will achieve what social theories failed to accomplish: invention of new In his initial architectural studies, Virilio had set out to document bunkers left behind by Second World War. Both reinforced houses and stabilized tanks, for him they reenacted protohistory of ancient warfare by resisting enemy's siege with weapons of obstruction.2 Architecture Principe sought to recreate and update this type of defensive architecture, an architecture resists man, which is an obstacle in his path. oblique thus participated in its own way in tactical form of warfare. Like Situationists, who sought to loosen grip of the society of spectacle with drifts through city, Virilio believed that change in consciousness could preempt effects of consumer society. However, after events of May '68 he came to believe that circulation and stasis, not state power and class struggle, were main factors of social