Getting back into no place: On Casey, deconstruction and the architecture of modernity

Abstract

Sam Shepherd's invocation of a desire for the oblivion of "no place" emblema? tizes the central concern of the following reflections. In attempting to think through a meeting point between Ed Casey's Getting Back into Place and the world of late 20th-century architecture, my thought has been drawn back ever and again to thoughts of no place and desolation. What I want to suggest in the following is that both the greatest merits and the greatest dangers of Casey's book from the viewpoint of architecture derive from the conflict between his topocentrism and an important stream of a-topian or even u-topian thought within architectural modernism and postmodernism. Perhaps I could begin to explain something of why I think that's the case in reference to a pre-war Utopian project by the German architect, Ludwig Hilberseimer (Fig. 1). In his proposal for a Hochhausstadt of late 1924, Hilberseimer projects a world of such stark placelessness that he himself, in later years, feels compelled to distance himself from it?decrying its bleakness as more like a "necropolis" than a "metropolis." To understand more precisely what I mean by "placelessness," I want to detail a little of the thinking behind Hilberseimer's project. First of all the Hochhausstadt is a response to Le Corbusier's own proposal for a high-rise city, the "City for 3 Million Inhabitants" first exhibited in Paris in 1922 (Hilberseimer, 1927: 17) (Fig. 2). Like Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier starts out in that project from the need to rationalize the modern city?to make