Toward A Minor Architecture

by Jill Stoner

Overview

A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built.

Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being—western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book.

Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete.

Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262300285
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/09/2012
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jill Stoner is Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Until recently a practicing architect, she has been the recipient of numerous national and international design awards. Her first book, Poems for Architects, explores contemporary spatial and architectural themes through an anthology of twentieth-century poems.

What People are Saying About This

Eric Cesal

For all architects who are wondering what avenues of creation are still possible in a post-recession landscape, Jill Stoner's Toward a Minor Architecture offers a thoughtful plan through which old, abandoned failures are the canvas on which new, adventurous architecture can be painted.

Dolores Hayden

Jill Stoner's intriguing new book proposes 'a more politicized practice of architecture.' Her readings of twentieth century fiction from Franz Kafka to John Cheever and Raymond Carver forge new interpretations of built space while transcending conventional categories such as regionalism or style. Toward a Minor Architecture will appeal to every architect with its literary reexamination of the profession's purpose and direction.

Kathy Mezei

In the tradition of the Poetics of Space and The Architectural Uncanny, Jill Stoner's fascinating tour (de force) of modern architectural spaces draws on literature and philosophy to offer us a radical, lyrical, and refreshingly hopeful re-visioning of the modern cityscape of late capitalism.

Endorsement

Countless references to spatial considerations in literature make Jill Stoner's case for an architecture—or rather for architectural acts—of inhabitation, usurpation, appropriation and change. Such active engagement with space has never been part of the official canon of masterpieces and major works, but comes from resistance to established systems of thought and patterns of use. Kafka, Benjamin, T.S. Eliot, Cheever, Borges and many others are Jill Stoner's companions and witnesses on her meandering journey.

—Dietrich Neumann, Royce Family Professor for the History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University

From the Publisher

Jill Stoner's intriguing new book proposes 'a more politicized practice of architecture.' Her readings of twentieth century fiction from Franz Kafka to John Cheever and Raymond Carver forge new interpretations of built space while transcending conventional categories such as regionalism or style. Toward a Minor Architecture will appeal to every architect with its literary reexamination of the profession's purpose and direction.

—Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, Yale University, author of The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.

This is an exciting and intellectually bold book. Interweaving architecture and literature, using literature to address space not through the primacy of vision but through the complexities of language, Toward a Minor Architecture offers us a new way of seeing architecture, insides and outsides, space and power, in terms of openings as much as closures.

—Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University

In the tradition of the Poetics of Space and The Architectural Uncanny, Jill Stoner's fascinating tour (de force) of modern architectural spaces draws on literature and philosophy to offer us a radical, lyrical, and refreshingly hopeful re-visioning of the modern cityscape of late capitalism.

—Kathy Mezei, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University

For all architects who are wondering what avenues of creation are still possible in a post-recession landscape, Jill Stoner's Toward a Minor Architecture offers a thoughtful plan through which old, abandoned failures are the canvas on which new, adventurous architecture can be painted.

—Eric Cesal, author of Down Detour Road

Countless references to spatial considerations in literature make Jill Stoner's case for an architecture—or rather for architectural acts—of inhabitation, usurpation, appropriation and change. Such active engagement with space has never been part of the official canon of masterpieces and major works, but comes from resistance to established systems of thought and patterns of use. Kafka, Benjamin, T.S. Eliot, Cheever, Borges and many others are Jill Stoner's companions and witnesses on her meandering journey.

—Dietrich Neumann, Royce Family Professor for the History of Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University

Elizabeth Grosz

This is an exciting and intellectually bold book. Interweaving architecture and literature, using literature to address space not through the primacy of vision but through the complexities of language, Toward a Minor Architecture offers us a new way of seeing architecture, insides and outsides, space and power, in terms of openings as much as closures.

Dietrich Neumann

Countless references to spatial considerations in literature make Jill Stoner's case for an architecture—or rather for architectural acts—of inhabitation, usurpation, appropriation and change. Such active engagement with space has never been part of the official canon of masterpieces and major works, but comes from resistance to established systems of thought and patterns of use. Kafka, Benjamin, T.S. Eliot, Cheever, Borges and many others are Jill Stoner's companions and witnesses on her meandering journey.

Editorial Reviews

Stoner's book reads as a novel, an architectural fiction. It is gentle, brilliantly precise and economical in its use of language. Sentences themselves open up new horizons for architectural reflection, in the manner of poetry.

—Lindsay Bremner and Jeremy Till, Architectural Review

Brilliantly and poetically conceived and written, this book is necessary reading for prospective architects and for anyone troubled by the disjunction between the slickness of major architecture and the abject qualities of the postindustrial landscape.

—Choice

From the Publisher

Brilliantly and poetically conceived and written, this book is necessary reading for prospective architects and for anyone troubled by the disjunction between the slickness of major architecture and the abject qualities of the postindustrial landscape.

—Choice

Reviews

Brilliantly and poetically conceived and written, this book is necessary reading for prospective architects and for anyone troubled by the disjunction between the slickness of major architecture and the abject qualities of the postindustrial landscape.

Choice

Stoner's book reads as a novel, an architectural fiction. It is gentle, brilliantly precise and economical in its use of language. Sentences themselves open up new horizons for architectural reflection, in the manner of poetry.

Architectural Review - Lindsay Bremner and Jeremy Till

Stoner (architecture, Univ. of California, Berkeley) follows in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), who worked to overturn the policies of Robert Moses, the urban planner who reshaped mid-20th-century New York City. She critiques the empty malls and office parks characteristic of urban sprawl and examines how they emerged from four major mindsets still prevalent in architecture. The book's chapters examine each of these "mythologies": of architecture as contra to nature, of building as autonomous object, of the supreme importance of interiors, and of the culture of architect as celebrity. Stoner argues that underutilized buildings can be transformed through something she terms minor architecture, which is the art of reoccupying them, e.g., the current artistic reclamation of abandoned buildings in Detroit. This book reimagines architecture as a kind of literature, and Stoner is heavily indebted to the writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari (coauthors, Anti-Oedipus), whose theories of minor literatures she used to shape her own ideas. VERDICT Recommended for all readers interested in architecture—this should be required reading in every design school.—Peter S. Kaufman, formerly with Boston Architectural Coll.

Library Journal