Impulse – Volume 13 Number 2, 1986/87

Publisher / Executive Editor:
Eldon Garnet

Managing Editor:
Judith Doyle

Editors:
Carolyn White and Brian Boigon

Contributing Editors:
Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Andrew Payne (Toronto)

Theoretical Architecture Guest Editor:
Susan A. Speigel

Associate Editors:
Eldon Garnet, Judith Doyle, Carolyn White, Brian Boigon (New York) and Andrew Payne

Art Direction:
Carolyn White

Assembly Assistant:
Werner Arnold

Advertising:
Werner Arnold and Janna Levitt

Business Manager:
John Allan

Proofreading:
Sabina Harris Dobo

Cover Design:
Carolyn White

Table of Contents:
Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Joshua Bendah, ‘Architecture of the Sensation’; Penny Umbrico, ‘House’; Hani Rashid, ‘Four Kursaals For Pierrettes and Evacuees’; Gelsomina Petti, ‘Renovation of the Body and the World’; Lorenzo Pignatti, ‘Forms of Inhabitation’; Margaret Priest, ‘Stairwell’; Kathryn Firth, ‘Conjectural Landscape’; Graham Owen, ‘Of Politics, History and Pleasure: The Theoretical Project as Excavation of the Modern’; Michael Piraino; Robert Stewart, ‘Brasilia: Ordem E Progresso’; Gordon Lebredt, ‘In a Manner Of Speaking’; Michael Gold, ‘Ideal Cities and Demolition’; Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Adrian Blackwell, ‘Essential Hut’.

Editorial:

A fine line between collaboration and desperation. A sense of learning that is intellectually erotic imagining a large picture of theoretical architecture, not one theory, proven.

You read the drawing.

There is a gap between theory and theoretical. There are theories of theoretical / architecture, about the whole thing not being revealed at a glance. / Renaissance architecture, where the whole is revealed to a privileged position. / And there is mannerist theory which appropriates renaissance theory and manners it, shifts it. That’s where theoretical architecture begins using theory as an / Object. / Appropriating theory to some other end.

Blood fraction.

All these strangers standing side by side. / Everyone knew that to be in the magazine structure meant sharing paper / and fictional space with others of unlike sensibilities, their adjacencies have created something that is / odd.

Adjacency is the most common type of spatial relationship. It allows each space to be clearly defined and to respond, each in its own way, to / functional or symbolic requirements. / The degree of visual and spatial continuity that occurs between two adjacent spaces will depend on the nature of the plane that both / separates and binds them together.

An interlocking spatial relationship consists of two spaces whose fields overlap to form a shared zone. / When the two interlock their volumes in this manner each retains its identity and / definition. But their configuration as two interlocking spaces will be subject to a number of interpretations.

Space theory becomes appropriated and flattened and abstracted.

The capricci are pictures that merge the real and the projected and that assemble the real into new configurations.

Finally we are caught / Labyrinthine / In dark boxes

Using the grand text of history, / Pursued through the relationship of the grid / to the plotting of beliefs

Ordering the contents of the dream into acceptable form.

Susan A. Speigel