Impulse – Volume 13 Number 1, Storm Corridor 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:
Michael McCarthy, ‘The Theoretical Imagination In Piranesi’s shaping of Architectural Reality’; Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Richard Cameron, ‘Enemies: My Lives Seem Transparent’; Alexander Pilis, ‘A Deadly Conversation’; Gordon Lebredt, ‘In A Manner Of Speaking’; Gelsomina Petti, ‘Renovations of the Body and World’; Margaret Priest, ‘No Exit’; Martin Vahtra, ‘Squatters Tactic and the Picturesque’; Janna Levitt, ‘The Executive the Braille Mind’; Spring Hurlbut; Brian Boigon, ‘Shopping for the Real’; Ed Kin Chan, ‘Urban Work Community Ipoh’; Mary Ann Unger, ‘Beehive Temple’; Frederic Urban, ‘House for Panza’; Margaret Priest, ‘NYC in August’; Susan A. Speigel, ‘Geometry of the Stain’; Paul Shepheard, ‘Phlegm The Trials of Lillibet’; Francois Schien, ‘Subway Map Floating on a New York Sidewalk 1986’; Michael Djordjevitch, ‘Of Facades and Plans’.

Editorial:

You construct a structure, a working surface between things that speaks across / distance / geographical fatality / selection assembly and interruption.

There is an awkward instance when you step off the known, the accomplished. / And attempt something – a change in sensibility where there is a gulf between / one sure territory and the next. You need. To allow for that moment, that / Awkwardness, that gap in surety, because from this risk comes something / Unexpected.

Theoretical architecture means dealing in the practice of pure theory, built or / Unbuilt.

Is theoretical architecture, architecture that just isn’t built? / A few pieces stand as built theoretical architecture. / Built architecture cannot be the pure representation of theoretical architecture. / By the time a thing gets built, thought is elsewhere. A fireplace is a representation of something powerful, no longer / necessary in itself. / Fire is theoretical now. / Inevitably theory gets built, but not in its most concentrated form. / Theoretical architecture takes place in publication.

It is important that architecture be more urgent than plumbing diagrams and / the building code. / But at that even the most conventional architectural drawing is an abstract / code speaking its own language. / Translation of spatial experience to an abstract language is common in / conventional architectural representation and / theoretical architecture.

There is a distended, tenuous but crucial relationship between theoretical architecture and architecture-built.

Architecture, once removed, becomes the theory of architecture, then once removed again begins to get built.

To see these two volumes as a complete picture – one is hard pressed to. / Process observations in advance of knowledge. / Proceed toward a metaphysic that enables us to find ourselves on a later plane / In a moment of knowledge wider than the previous one.

The working surface of this publication: theoretical architecture, its obsession / with language, manipulation and appropriation of codes and discourses.

Surpassing of accurate portrayal of existing scenes to create an alternative state which can only exist in the mind.

A city of the mind

Architecture of the mind.

Susan A. Speigel