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Debating postmodernism in the 'third space’ of the International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA)

par Van Acker, Wouter ;Bourouiba, Lyna
Editeur scientifique Esteban-Maluenda, Ana
Référence (15-17 June 2022: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference of EAHN
Publication Publié, 2022

Abstract de conférence

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Résumé :

During the 1980s, the International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA) organized several meetings on architectural criticism and issues that preoccupied the minds of architectural thinkers. The issue of postmodernism was tackled by its president – Bruno Zevi –, its directors – Dennis Sharp, Julius Posener, Jorge Glusberg, Pierre Vago –, and its members – Moniek Bucquoye, Mario Gandelsonas, Louise Noelle Gras de Mereles or Toshio Nakamura, among others –, under the banner of architecture as a language, the zero degree of architectural writing, the more controversial books of the period or retro/pre/post/late/post postmodernism. Besides the principal ambition of CICA to commit to architectural criticism and put it at the service of architectural design, it established a unique platform to host an ongoing conversation between an international group of architectural critics, from various European countries, the United States, Latin America and Japan. The organization of its meetings proceeded rather methodically. In view of a public event, usually held in a prestigious building, the CICA prepared an internal meeting on a theme proposed by one or several members. All who participated in this seminar presented a paper, which was debated at length. The meeting was generally closed with a public lecture, at the occasion of which the CICA awards for architectural criticism were given, followed by a day of visits to museums and buildings in the city. Finally, little black booklets were published reporting on the meeting’s results. Based on the documentation of the CICA meetings held in the early 1980s on the question of architecture as a language, this presentation interrogates the nature of these events, not only as spaces where knowledge was gathered to legitimize architectural criticism as a profession, but also as places for transcultural negotiations. We propose a reading of CICA’s events as “Third Spaces” (Bhabha 1994), i.e. meetings of “social groups with different cultural traditions and potentials of power as a special kind of negotiation or translation that takes place in a Third Space of enunciation” (Ikas and Wagner, 2009, 2). On the one hand, we intend to study these international intellectual exchanges, not through the unidirectional notion of influence, but through the more negotiated and interwoven perspective of transculturality. On the other hand, we aim to come to grips with processes of transculturation as they bypass Americentric and Eurocentric assumptions which may be detected within CICA’s international dynamics.