David Hodge The difficult whole: Siah Armajani, Robert Venturi

and the politics of modernist architecture

In 1980, the Iranian-American sculptor Siah Armajani made a number of

outdoor installations, called reading and meeting gardens (e.g. Reading
Garden #1, figs. 1, 2, 3). Some of these remain extant, while others have been
dismantled. Each comprised a cuboid shed with an open front along with
various benches, fences and screens. They were primarily made of wood
and painted in white, black, redwood brown and dark, park bench green.
Although their titles suggest a functional purpose (i.e. reading room
or meeting room), they all resisted use to a significant extent. In each
installation some of the fences closed off areas of grass, and Armajani did not
incorporate gates or openings to render these spaces accessible. The sheds
were often empty and even when they did contain furniture, they generally
lacked sufficient light for comfortable reading. Furthermore, Janet Kardon
has noted that the benches were built with a cultivated clumsiness; the right
angle joining seat to seat-back is discomforting enough to make sitting an
active, rather than passive activity.1 As Nancy Princethal puts it, the gardens
were therefore elusively inviting.2 Their promise of functionality was swiftly
rescinded by their deliberately ungainly, cumbersome forms.
Since 1968, Armajani has consistently made art on the border between
sculpture and architecture, with works including bridges, gazebos, reading
rooms and other architectural structures. In a manifesto written in 1978,
Armajani pledged himself to a practice of public sculpture, which should
be less about the self-expression and myth of the maker and more about its
civicness. This text also rejected the traditional assumption that artworks
should be functionless, instead arguing that public artists should aim to
satisfy a general social and cultural need.3 Based on this rhetoric, critics
discussing Armajanis work have commonly argued that his works are open
and democratic by virtue of the way that they integrate public engagement
through invitations to use. 4 However, while this approach accurately reflects
the artists statements, it does not really speak to his works, since many of his
constructions are actually impossible to use and even when they do invite
interaction, they usually render it difficult and uncomfortable.
According to Armajani, these barriers to use play a key role in determining
his works relationship with the medium of sculpture. Although he often calls
himself a sculptor, in 1978, when asked whether his architectural installations
should really be categorized within that medium, he acknowledged that
it is difficult to say.5 However, he suggested that they could be seen as
non-functional architecture, a category which ultimately shares the same

381 |Hodge: The difficult whole doi:10.3828/sj.2016.25.3.7

1. Siah Armajani, Reading Garden
#1, 1980, wood, metal and paint,
dimensions unknown. Roanoke
College (Roanoke, Virginia)
(photo: Roanoke College)
properties as sculpture. Furthermore, as architectural constructions that
resist functionality, he argued that his works comprise investigations into
the qualities and properties of lived-in structures.6 In other words, through
their autonomy from the functional demands of architecture or their status
as sculpture Armajanis works invite meditation on the built environment.
By resisting utility, they maintain a function as platforms for thought.
Any reflection on Armajanis works must come to terms with their deeply
counterintuitive compositions. The reading and meeting gardens all
feature parts joined together at acute and irregular angles as well as benches
placed in strangely isolated positions or located at oblique orientations to
other elements of the work. Describing Meeting Garden (1980), Kardon has
written that a number of disparate elements sprawl in a seemingly aleatory
arrangement.7 The works decidedly inharmonious compositions are further
confused by the way that fences, walls and screens frequently act as barriers.
These impede the viewers gaze, ensuring that the installations can never be
apprehended as a whole. Their oddly jumbled arrangements therefore unfold
through a series of physically and perceptually isolated experiences.
In 1978, Armajani suggested that his deliberately awkward compositions
addressed a concern regarding the relationship between part and whole.
Although the following passage specifically discusses the house, it equally
resonates with his experiments in other architectural formats:
The house does not appear to me first in terms of houseness, but rather
in terms of its individual parts walls, doors, floor, etc. By focusing on
382 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]
 the parts, rather than the whole, I am trying to substitute synergy for
gestalt. This means that the individual parts do not necessarily make or
predict the whole. Synergy is a process in which the whole, as revealed
through the relationship of its parts, is not complete the house is
a kind of event which generates certain perspectives so that one can
view or experience it. It doesnt mean, however, that one perspective is
consistent or adequate for all the parts, nor does it mean that each side
is going to enhance the previous experience of the other side, but may
even contradict it, or annihilate it altogether.8

This mode of synergetic composition is exemplified by the reading and

meeting gardens. Their isolated benches and awkward conjunctions stop
the works components from ever establishing an overall gestalt. The visual
blockages caused by fences and screens also fragment the viewers experience
into a series of discrete perspectives. In the same interview Armajani stated
that, by disrupting any holistic apprehension of his works component parts,
he sought to encourage an exploration of [their] distinct properties. Since
the parts of his constructions refuse to form a clear unity, he said, they must
be recognized as distinct and considered separately.9 However, physical
connections and spatial juxtapositions between the installations elements
also confront viewers with the question of composition. Benches often
traverse the outsides of fences, adopting these low partitions as seat backs.
Open arches, comprising thin wooden beams, run down from the top of each
shed to the furniture in front of it. In Reading Garden #1 (1980), a long fence
runs from one side of the work to the other, forming its isolated elements
into an ensemble. So, while each element is offered up in its idiosyncratic
particularity, the works also continually pose the question of interrelation as
an enigmatic puzzle.
This article explores Armajanis concern regarding the relationship
between part and whole in architectural composition. It shows that his
2. Siah Armajani, Reading
Garden #1 (model), 1980, interest in this issue developed through a dialogue with the architect and
wood, dimensions unknown,
location unknown
theorist Robert Venturi. However, it will also situate both figures within
(photo: Siah Armajani) a longer trajectory of modernist architecture, highlighting De Stijl as a
particularly important precursor. Furthermore,
it will argue that Armajanis sculptures initiate
a critique of Venturis early writing, making a
significant intervention into the architectural
theory of the post-war period and reconnecting
architectural practice with its roots in the
politics of class struggle. For Armajani, the
technical and aesthetic aspects of construction
are always inseparable from social and political
concerns. This is lucidly revealed in a passage
from an essay he wrote in 2002, which discusses
partwhole relations in the context of American
vernacular architecture:

383 |Hodge: The difficult whole

3. Siah Armajani, Reading Garden
#1, 1980, wood, metal and paint,
dimensions unknown. Roanoke
College (Roanoke, Virginia)
(photo: Roanoke College)

In the early American log cabins, grain elevators, silos, farm houses,
barns, and bridges, the structure, the framing, and the boarding were
open. There were gaps in the process in order to reveal the construction
The materials were on their own and could not be overlooked In
construction one part did not mask the other. One part was always next
to the other part as a chair was next to the wall or a table was by the
window; one resided next to the other. One looked after the other. One
belonged to the other and the two belonged to a totality.10

Having begun purely as a discussion of architectural style, by its end this

passage clearly becomes a metaphor for egalitarian cohabitation. It thereby
reveals the underlying impetus for Armajanis formal experiments the
question of how different individuals can live together, without relationships
of domination.

Armajani, Venturi and the difficult whole

In 1978, Armajani referenced Robert Venturis first book, Complexity and

Contradiction in Architecture (1966), as a major influence for his own ideas
about architectural composition.11 Venturis text is a trenchant critique
of Modern architecture (always with a capital M). Indeed, although he
has consistently rejected the term, Venturi is often presented as either
one of the first postmodern architects, or at least as a major influence
over the development of postmodernism.12 Citing Mies van der Rohe and
Le Corbusier as key examples, Complexity and Contradiction argued that
Modern architects sought to exclude any hint of stylistic diversity and totally
subordinated every element to a single, uniform aesthetic. For instance,
Venturi presented modernists common preference for the standardization of

384 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

units (as in Le Corbusiers urban plans) as a dreaded agent of domination and
brutality. He also criticized modernists refusal to engage with the existing
context around a building, which might force the integration of varying
styles.13
In opposition to this homogenizing approach, Venturi championed an
architecture that accommodates the circumstantial contradictions of a
complex reality.14 According to him, this meant producing buildings which
would stylistically express the diversity of both their functions and their
environment, leading to ambiguity, tension and oscillating relationships,
with different styles jostling against each other. Venturi saw this as a positive
development, promoting richness of meaning over clarity of meaning.15
Crucially, however, Venturi insisted that [a]n architecture of complexity
and accommodation does not forsake the whole.16 Instead, he argued that
such an architecture should produce the difficult whole or embody the
difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.17 In other
words, architects should seek modes of composition which would allow their
components to form a shared unity, without sacrificing their particularity.
Planning on whatever scale level should provide a framework for the
twin-phenomenon of the individual and the collective without resorting to
arbitrary accentuation of either one at the expense of the other.18 This same
desire is continually manifested in Armajanis practice, as exemplified in the
reading and meeting gardens.
Discussing Venturi in 1978, Armajani made it clear that he understood
the architects ideas in political terms. I am strongly influenced by
Robert Venturis writings, Armajani stated, especially his Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture. His perspective on American social democracy
is very important because it incorporates political, social and economic
considerations. It is the attitude of inclusion, not exclusion.19 This particular
framing of Venturis work is notable because, aside from occasional, vague
references to social needs, Complexity and Contradiction lacks any direct
political commentary or even any discussion of architectures place in a
broader social framework, beyond purely artistic concerns.20 While many of
its ideas can certainly be read as social metaphors, Venturi very rarely frames
them in such terms himself. It is therefore only in Armajanis work that the
architects call for diversity became explicitly politicized.
Given its historical context, Armajanis interpretation of Complexity
and Contradiction as a socially minded text is understandable. The book
was published in 1966, the year when the term Black Power began to gain
currency in the USA. Amid growing racial tension and increasing awareness
of the oppression of African Americans, it is not surprising that a book
about aesthetic diversity and inclusiveness might be read in political terms.
Furthermore, other writers who dealt with similar architectural issues during
this period did invoke politics more explicitly. In 1969, for example, Denise
Scott Brown a close collaborator of Venturis wrote an essay which also
denounced modernism for its normative approach.21 However, rather than
explaining the problem in purely artistic terms, she attacked the class biases

385 |Hodge: The difficult whole


4. Siah Armajani, Stuttgart Bridge
No. 5, 1997, coloured pencil on
mylar, location unknown
(photo: Siah Armajani)
of most trained urban planners. She urged them to
develop a respectful understanding regarding the
felt needs and way of life of people from different
backgrounds. This, she wrote, is a socially
responsible activity.22
Many of Armajanis works evoke comparable
concerns regarding the lives of the excluded
and oppressed. For example, as I have discussed
elsewhere, between 1975 and 1977 Armajani made
a series of works relating to Thomas Jeffersons
Monticello, the home he designed and built
for himself in Virginia. All of these sculptures
subtly acknowledge the former presidents slave
ownership by alluding to the underground rooms,
beneath Monticello, in which Jeffersons domestic
slaves worked.23 Another example, discussed at
length by Valrie Mavridorakis, is his group of
pieces relating to the Italian-born anarchists
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were
executed in the USA in 1927. Mavridorakis argues
that these works (e.g. Sacco and Vanzetti Reading
Room, 1987) commemorate activists prosecuted for
acts of social unrest at one of the most repressive
moments of twentieth-century America.24
However, Armajanis statements about Sacco and
Vanzetti also suggest an identification with their status as immigrants an
unsurprising sympathy given his own background. Sacco and Vanzetti,
their demand was very simple, he has stated; they said in Italy we read
that the constitution guarantees us happiness, the constitution guarantees
us education, and we have been here all these years, and I am selling fish,
and Vanzetti is fixing shoes, and we dont have any other education what
happened? Who broke these promises?25
In some instances these political concerns can be connected directly
with Armajanis formal techniques. Nancy Princenthal has observed that
the awkward junctions between components that feature in many of his
sculptures can be understood as products of a certain [c]ross-cultural
influence. Specifically, [t]he irregular angles at which walls meet in his works
can be seen as translations into three dimensions of the nonperspectival
composition used in Persian miniatures.26 Armajani first experimented with
the aesthetics of Persian miniature painting in early works such as Songs
(1957), which were made before he left Iran at the end of the 1950s. Since the
mid-1980s he has also made many drawings (including Stuttgart Bridge No. 5,
1997, fig. 4), which include images of his own sculptures, as well as depictions
of vernacular American architecture, all represented via a perspectival system
derived from Persian miniatures. These works frequently depict sections of
fencing, which are much like those in the reading and meeting gardens,
386 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

5. Siah Armajani, Bridge for
Venturi, 1970, wood, stain, 1476
5/812 in. (35.5194.531 cm).
Walker Art Center
(photo: Walker Art Centre)
although their sharp, angular corners are further accentuated by the multiple
perspectives of traditional Iranian painting. So, in these drawings, Armajanis
deliberately jarring conjunction of forms is directly related to a combination
of cultural reference points a spatial system from Iranian art juxtaposed
against picket fences and other vernacular American forms. Raising questions
regarding immigration and multiculturalism, these works directly inject
Venturis ideas with political concerns.
Although Armajani clearly drew a great deal from Complexity and
Contradiction, his insistent politicization of Venturis ideas has also led to
major differences between them. This is most clearly illustrated through a
work which initially presents itself as a straightforward homage to Venturi,
but actually diverges from his ideas significantly. In 1970, Armajani made
a small wooden model called Bridge for Venturi (fig. 5), one of an extensive
series of bridges he has designed since 1969. An opening at the bottom-
middle of this sculpture leads upwards via enclosed slopes on both sides. The
columns supporting its weight all comprise a number of cuboid blocks, which
are stacked on top of each other in assymetrical and seemingly unstable
patterns, making the bridge feel quite precarious. This sense of instability is
emphasized by a network of struts running in various directions across the
front of each enclosed section and bracing the objects sides. Slightly messy
in places due to the bridges unusual slope, the struts run down towards
the columns, emphasizing the lines of force being silently exerted upon the
dubious supports. With its truss system and solid presence, the work also
strongly evokes the aesthetics of industrial architecture.
Bridge for Venturi takes its impetus from a specific passage of Complexity
and Contradiction in which bridges are said to embody the contrast between
an aesthetic of imposed uniformity and the complexity which arises when
accommodating buildings to existing landscapes. According to Venturi,
the bridge vividly expresses the play of exaggeratedly pure order against
circumstantial inconsistencies. This is because the neat engineering of
a bridges upper surface, designed to efficiently convey vehicles over an
even span strongly contrasts with the exceptional accommodation of the
structural order below, which through distortion the expedient device of
387 |Hodge: The difficult whole
 elongated or shortened piers accommodates the bridge to the uneven terrain
of the ravine.27 Bridge for Venturi emphasizes this contradiction. Its precarious
columns highlight the devices and distortions used to produce a semblance
of uniformity, refusing any sense of smooth passage and emphasizing
the strenuous labour that its artifice involves. However, despite its strong
resonance with Venturis claims, the work diverges from his approach
significantly. Rather than realizing a difficult whole by removing any
subordination of the works elements, it allegorizes the way in which any easy
unity of exclusion enlists, entraps and subjugates individual components
to achieve a false image of harmonious balance. In other words, instead of
modelling utopian collectivity, Bridge for Venturi takes a critical approach,
expressing the oppressions which operate within dogmatic universalism.
Here Armajani presents the difficult whole not as a living presence, but as a
lack or a demand which remains to be met.
As well as being a formal exercise, Bridge for Venturi also presents itself as
a metaphor for the social status of the working class. The blocks supporting
the bridge carry a palpable physical load, standing in as surrogates for the
anonymous workers whose bodily exertion (or dead labour) is congealed
into all of the architectural constructions around us. Armajani has frequently
expressed a strong identification with ordinary working-class labourers. For
example, he often likes to ask people who they think is the most important
modern artist. When they inevitably name Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo or
some other famous modernist, he answers no its the workers who painted
the Forth Bridge.28 This identification with working-class labour is also
manifested throughout his practice by near-constant references to industrial
and vernacular architecture, as in all of the works discussed here thus far.
However, while in interviews and statements Armajani has generally
stressed the dignity of manual labour, Bridge for Venturi allegorizes the

6. Siah Armajani, Red School

House for Thomas Paine, 1978,
corrugated metal, plexiglass,
wood, paint, 103422 feet
(310.46.7 m), destroyed
(shown installed at Philadelphia
College of Art, 1978)
(photo: Siah Armajani)

388 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

difficulty of physical toil and even the exploitation of proletarian work,
which forms the lifeblood of the capitalist economy. As Karl Marx famously
demonstrated, capitalism in all of its forms is totally dependent upon
the subordination of an oppressed class, without whose systematically
under-rewarded labour no profit could accrue.29 I stress this here because
Armajanis acknowledgement of class conflict places significant pressure on
the politics of diversity implied in Complexity and Contradiction. As Ellen
Meiksins Wood has argued, class is a form of difference which, unlike gender,
sexuality or ethnicity, can only ever be oppressive.30 Class relations are by
definition relations of power, hence the traditional socialist emphasis on the
creation of a classless society. So, while Armajanis concern regarding the
plight of oppressed groups shows that he shares Venturis belief in inclusivity,
Bridge for Venturi also demonstrates two important differences between
them. First, by insistently presenting the difficult whole as a both a political
metaphor and a painful lack, rather than an established aesthetic structure,
Armajani reminds the viewer that its utopian demand remains unanswered
and can never adequately be met until it is solved throughout the entire social
sphere, beyond the limited realm of art. Secondly, whereas Complexity and
Contradiction presents heterogeneity as a good in itself, Bridge for Venturi
complicates this assumption, countering Venturis fetishization of difference
by suggesting that this concept must constantly be resituated against the
horizon of ongoing social struggles.

Armajani and modernisms difficult whole

One work by Armajani that can be associated directly with the concept of the
difficult whole is a large architectural installation called Red School House
for Thomas Paine (1978, now destroyed, figs. 6, 7, 8). According to Kardon,
when asked about this piece around the time of its construction, Armajani
explicitly connected it with the influence of the architect Robert Venturi.31
This connection is equally evidenced by the works composition, which offers
another exemplary instance of Armajanis synergetic approach. Like so many
of his sculptures, the school house was not actually functional. Its structure
comprised four separate units (entry, portico, corner and exit) arranged
in a lop-sided V shape with no internal passages between them.32 These
four sections were placed in a deliberately illogical order for example, the
portico (see fig. 8) sat behind a side wall rather than in front of the entrance.
Furthermore, as Kardon noted, the walls were out of scale with each other,
often extending significantly beyond the structures behind them and thus
making it impossible to gain an overall sense of the work from any given
perspective.33 Through its title, Red School House invited viewers to explore a
single, coherent building, but this was consistently denied by its actual form,
which instead generated a series of conflicting perspectives.
Although in many ways Red School House exemplified Armajanis close
engagement with Venturis ideas, at the same time it also marked a significant

389 |Hodge: The difficult whole

divergence from the most basic claims made in Complexity and Contradiction.
Venturi presented his notion of the difficult whole as a departure from
modernist aesthetics, proposing a clean break within architectural practice.
Red School House is one of many works by Armajani that undermine this
argument by producing complex and contradictory relationships through
distinctly modernist techniques. In this and other sculptures, Armajani elided
Venturian theory with modernist practice, refusing any clear distinction
between them.
As Kardon noted, Red School House appears to have walls built to
fundamentally different scales, with some reaching significantly beyond
the height of the interior space. In some cases the protruding upper sections
are black, while the area beneath them is white, emphasizing the mismatch
between inside and outside. A comparable approach features in many of
Armajanis other works (such as One Bedroom House, 1972), where parts often
overlap each other, rendering them visually distinct. This method has an
important precursor in the work of the Dutch modernist architect Gerrit
Rietveld, who was a member of the De Stijl group during the 1910s and 1920s.
In works such as Red and Blue Chair (1917) and Rietveld Schrder House (1924,
co-designed with Truss Schrder), Rietveld pioneered a particular method of
joining components whereby all of the parts had overhanging edges, reaching
past the far side of any adjacent forms. A small-scale version of this can also
be seen in the crossbars running along the top of Bridge for Venturi. In such
a composition, each element reads as a discrete shape, rather than being
subordinated to an overall gestalt. Or, as Michael White explains, the Rietveld
joint allowed each structural element to preserve a visual identity while
clearly expressing its dependency on its neighbours.34
Like Rietveld, Armajani has also often used colour to produce visual
distinctions between a works components. In many of Armajanis
architectural sculptures, including Red House and Lissitzkys Neighborhood:
Centre House (1978), adjacent forms are painted in bright, contrasting hues,
clearly differentiating them from each other and securing their status as
separate components.35 Precisely the same technique can be seen in Rietvelds
Red Blue Chair as well as the interior of the Rietveld Schrder House, where
highly saturated primary colours (as well as areas of black and white) strongly
demarcate different areas of the space.
White has noted that these contrasts inside the Rietveld Schrder House
are functional as well as decorative. Both Schrder and Rietveld wanted the
house to have an open plan, but Schrder (who subsequently lived there with
her children) was also concerned to enable some degree of privacy.36 This
was partly achieved through movable partitions on the top floor, which can
create separate rooms or be pulled back to enable an open space. However,
White argues that Rietveld, who designed the buildings colour scheme, also
employed its hues to similar ends. For instance, he painted the floor of the
boys sleeping area bright red, helping this space to retain a degree of visual
separation even when the partitions are removed. Similarly, White notes that
a large white stripe running from the front to the back of the house separates

390 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

7. Siah Armajani, Red School
House for Thomas Paine, 1978,
corrugated metal, plexiglass,
wood, paint, 103422 feet
(310.46.7 m), destroyed
(shown installed in Dayco Park,
Dayton, Ohio, 1978)
(photo: Siah Armajani)

the boys from the girls rooms and leads the visitor around the stairwell to
the seating area.37 This is important because, when the partitions are pulled
back, inhabitants coming up the stairs face into these two sleeping areas,
totally integrating the spaces with the communal movements of the house.
White suggests that by visually separating the two spaces from each other
and from the stairs, Rietveld tried to maintain a subtle distinction between
public and private, balancing the familys shared living arrangements
with each members own personal space. I stress this functional aspect of
Rietvelds colour composition because it shows that almost forty years before
the publication of Complexity and Contradiction, a modernist architect was
already attempting to maintain a delicate balance between individuality and
cohabitation, not only in aesthetic terms, but also within the social conditions
that his buildings established.
This comparison demonstrates that the dream of the difficult whole
was already a key concern for at least one major modernist. Moreover, the
same issue was also live throughout the work of the De Stijl group and was
especially important for its leader, the painter Theo Van Doesburg. Through
the detailed discussion of Van Doesburg that follows, we will see that for him
this was an absolutely central issue, crossing boundaries between art and
architecture as well as aesthetics and politics.
Van Doesburg first began to experiment with abstraction in 1915, making
the leap to fully abstract work in 1917. For two years after that (as well as in
various other compositions from later periods) he pioneered a technique
that resonates with Armajanis work in very interesting ways. Van Doesburgs
earliest abstract paintings and stained-glass designs (such as Stained-Glass
Composition IV, 1917) were made through the repetition of fairly simple
assymetrical motifs. As Richard Padovan explains, these patterns are put
through various kinds of translations, reflections and rotations, so each
iteration looks different, even where it is formally identical to some of the

391 |Hodge: The difficult whole

others.38 This means that each painting has a unifying compositional principle
which proceeds not through the subordination of components to a fixed
schema, but instead through the variation of elements and the production of
visual diversity. Van Doesburgs paintings and stained-glass designs therefore
represent one attempt at what Venturi would later call the difficult unity of
inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.
Ideas much like Venturis concept of the difficult whole also appear in
Van Doesburgs writings. Padovan notes that by differentiating his patterns,
Van Doesburg effectively disguised his own technique, so that viewers will
generally not immediately recognize his process as one of repetition.39 Only
by reflecting on the work over time will they unravel the artists procedure.
Van Doesburg discussed this in 1925, arguing that, in his preferred mode of
aesthetic experience, the viewer shares inwardly in the creation of each
work. As they tease out the paintings compositional principle, he claimed,
it undergoes a new re-creation in the consciousness of the observer. 40
Consequently,

the observer is compelled to experience with the artist the continual

and repeated exchange and cancelling out of position and dimension,
lines and planes. He will understand how harmonious relationships
finally spring from this play of recurrent exchange and cancelling
out of one element by another. Each part unites with other parts. The
formative unity of the whole grows out of all the parts (but single parts of
the whole do not dominate and stand out). 41

Here we find a conception of aesthetic experience in which unity emerges

through the interrelation of distinct parts, which combine through the fact
of their individuality and difference, rather than on the basis of an external
or abstract mediator. This suggests that, for Van Doesburg, true harmony
was not to be produced through levelling schemas or the cancellation
of particularity, but instead via the egalitarian collaboration of diverse
components.
Van Doesburg was also interested in how these ideas and techniques could
apply to the built environment. In his essay Towards a plastic architecture
(1924), he wrote that [t]he new architecture has destroyed both monotonous
repetition and the rigid symmetry of two halves. 42 He did not specify which
buildings he meant, but one candidate might be the Rietveld Schrder House,
which features four visually distinct faades. Against symmetry, he wrote,
the new architecture sets the balanced relationship of unequal parts, i.e., of
parts which, because of their different functional character, differ in position,
dimension, proportion and location.43 Here Van Doesburgs text acknowledges
the importance of diversity, championing an approach to architectural
design which operates through rather than against the varying particularity
of its elements. As well as the design of individual structures, he suggested
that this principle should also be applied to the building group and the the
whole town. As Padovan has argued, Van Doesburgs idea of the unique,
unrepeatable single unit that nevertheless forms part of a harmonious,

392 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

 unified street or city exactly parallels the concept of the individual who
remains perfectly free while united with society. 44
Towards a plastic architecture shows that, for Van Doesburg, it was crucial
to apply these ideas beyond the limited sphere of fine art, extending them to
the whole space of the city. This speaks to a broader trend within modernism
in general since, as Peter Brger famously argued, the historic avant-garde
continually sought to undermine distinctions between art and life or
aesthetics and politics. 45 This is demonstrated throughout Van Doesburgs
writing. In 1926, for example, he argued against an overly functionalist
approach to architecture, conjuring the nightmarish image of a city reduced
to only those elements which would gratify our material requirement for life
in the most economical way. In such an environment, he argued, the architect
would define precisely the amount of cubic meters required for every
practical need and cut out all the superfluous space. The architectural shape
would become totally dependent upon our movements, which then could
be checked by means of a Taylor-system. Would this not lead to an absolute
rigidity and sterilization of our lives?46 Through his reference to Taylorization
an approach to industrial efficiency focused on the standardization of
bodily movements and workplace procedures Van Doesburg showed that
he was worried not only about aesthetic homogenization, but also about the
mental and physical restraint imposed within a rigid industrial environment.
Unlike in Complexity and Contradiction, here there is no clear border between
aesthetics and politics, with one immanently flowing into the other.
These examples from Rietveld and Van Doesburg clearly suggest that the
idea of the difficult whole was already alive within modernism. However,
these are only two artists, and it may yet be suspected that De Stijl was
simply an outlier within a modernist movement that otherwise generally
accords with Venturis claims. In one sense this is indeed the case, since

8. Siah Armajani, Red School

House for Thomas Paine, 1978,
corrugated metal, plexiglass,
wood, paint, 103422 feet
(310.46.7 m), destroyed
(shown installed in Dayco Park,
Dayton, Ohio, 1978)
(photo: Siah Armajani)

393 |Hodge: The difficult whole

the formal solutions proposed by other modernist architects are usually
closer to Venturis image of the Modern than they are to those proposed
by Van Doesburg and Rietveld. Nonetheless, even when their practices were
characterized by stylistic normativity, modernists consistently demonstrated
an awareness regarding the difficult whole as a significant problem with
which they were confronted. This can be demonstrated via an architect whom
Venturi cited as a key offender Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusiers large-scale housing projects and city designs (e.g. Unit
dHabitation, 1947) were all based on a cellular logic, with strictly separated
dwelling units combined into a single, shared building. Padovan has noted
that one key inspiration for this approach was the compartmentalized
organization of Carthusian monasteries, which Le Corbusier had first
experienced at Galluzzo in Florence in 1907. Padovan explains that in a
Carthusian monastery, each monk lives apart in a self-contained house
with its own courtyard garden, a design which combines a high degree of
individual privacy (the cell) with a structured pattern of collective life:
the refectory, the chapter house, the abbey church. 47 Le Corbusier himself
discussed this upon returning to the Galluzzo monastery in 1911, writing:
[m]y first impression was one of harmony, but not until later did the
essential, profound lesson of the place sink in on me that here the equation
which it was the task of human wit to solve, the reconciliation of individual
on the one hand and collectivity on the other, lay resolved. 48 His answer to
this problem was undoubtedly very different from that of De Stijl, Venturi or
Armajani, since his cellular model involved rigorous standardization, with a
single formal logic presiding over every unit. However, this example suggests
that even the most rigidly normative modernists could still be alive to the
problem of the difficult whole. I submit that the whole field of modernist
architecture swirls around this problem, not acting as a monolithic tendency
with a single, uniform answer, but instead as a contested terrain, evidencing a
multiplicity of different approaches.

Armajanis intervention into architectural theory

Despite his strong identification with the arguments presented in Complexity

and Contradiction, we have seen that Armajani made two major amendments
to Venturis concept of the difficult whole. First, rather than treating it
purely as an aesthetic idea solely relating to issues of formal composition, for
Armajani it was always also a political issue, concerning social relationships
between diverse individuals. Secondly, whereas Venturi presented his theory
as a departure from modernism, for Armajani it was in fact a continuation of
the modernist tradition. In this section we will see that, by establishing these
points of disagreement, Armajani made a significant intervention into the
broader field of post-war architectural theory.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Venturi and Scott Brown were far from alone
in reassessing the legacy of modernist architecture. 49 During the post-war

394 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

period, the International Style was popularized among architects and city
planners across the world. With modernism rapidly becoming a hegemonic
approach, critics became increasingly sceptical about its methods. However,
although in this general sense Complexity and Contradiction can be seen
as typical of its era, Venturis approach was not shared by all of his peers.
Specifically, whereas he solely focused on issues of artistic form, other critics
often took a much broader historical and political perspective. In 1972, for
example, the American architectural theorist Colin Rowe argued that, while
pre-war European modernism was conceived as an adjunct of socialism and
probably sprang from approximately the same ideological roots as Marxism,
in the post-war USA its stylistic developments had been separated from
these political concerns.50 According to Rowe, modernism had gone from
being an experimental avant-garde movement, which was deeply immersed
in the leftist politics of its day, to effectively becoming the house style of
international capitalism:

When, in the late 1940s, modern architecture became established and

institutionalized, necessarily, it lost something of its original meaning
For, when modern architecture became proliferated throughout the
world, when it became cheaply available, standardized and basic
necessarily there resulted a rapid devaluation of its ideal content. The
intensity of its social vision became distanced. The building became
no longer a subversive proposition about a possible Utopian future. It
became instead the acceptable decoration of a certainly non-Utopian
present The scene was now ripe for the cheap politician and the
commercial operator. The revolution had both succeeded and failed.51

Rowes account of modernisms initial impetus resonates with my earlier

discussion of Van Doesburg, which showed that, for him, the difficult whole
was always an immanently political idea as well as an aesthetic model.
According to Rowe, this coupling of aesthetics and politics was dissolved in
the post-war period, when all social content was removed from the modernist
programme, leaving it as a set of technical procedures divorced from political
critique.
A similar argument was made by the critic Kenneth Frampton in 1979.
Frampton complained that architectural practice had recently been purged
of all social considerations, with construction now being dictated purely by
the demands of technical efficiency (or the optimization of profit margins)
rather than users needs.52 His account contrasts sharply with discussions of
technical standardization among pre-war modernists. While it is true that
modernist architects did sometimes risk fetishizing industrial technologies,
they also consistently presented standardization and efficiency as answers
to social problems such as housing shortages and the poor living conditions
of the urban working class. As Ross Wolfe has discussed, during the 1930s
architects presented industrialization as the basis for offering citizens a
Minimum Dwelling not a single model to which all must conform, but a
certain basic standard of housing which would improve the conditions of the

395 |Hodge: The difficult whole

masses, significantly reducing class inequalities.53 By the end of the 1970s,
Frampton argued that such concerns had been removed from the modernist
programme, leaving only the husk of pure technique. To put this differently,
we might say that the political allegiance of modernism was effectively
reversed. In 1973, the Italian architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri argued that
modernists utopian proposals for the organization of collective life had been
integrated into the logic of capital, forming an assembly line of standardized
buildings, dictated by the iron-clad laws of profit.54
In this context it is easy to understand why Complexity and Contradiction
dismissed the modernist tradition so readily, even ignoring those aspects
which very closely resembled Venturis own project. While the historical
factors discussed by Rowe, Frampton and others are never referenced in
Complexity and Contradiction, they are tacitly acknowledged in the preface
to the second edition of Learning from Las Vegas, which Venturi co-published
with Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1977. Here the authors state: Because
we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intense
admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own
times, proclaimed the right revolution.55 Indeed, their admiration for early
modernists was so great that they even included the early generations of
Heroic Modern architects in a list of acknowledgements at the front of the
book.56 Sardonic references to modernists as heroic elsewhere in the text
suggest that this dedication was more ambivalent than it might initially
seem.57 Nonetheless, the point remains that Venturi was not actually rejecting
modernism as a whole, but instead opposing the Modern with a capital M
modernist architecture in its newly institutionalized form. This was not
clear in Complexity and Contradiction, which appeared to dismiss the entire
modernist tradition.
Most importantly, Venturis analysis repeated and re-entrenched the
depoliticization of modernism that had taken place during the post-war
period. Whereas Rowe, Tafuri, Frampton, Scott Brown and others all
bemoaned the destruction of architectures social aspirations which
accompanied its reduction to dogmatic technicism, Venturi approached
modernism and its possible successors from a solely aesthetic, intra-artistic
perspective, eliding any political questions. Whereas Rowe called upon
architects to renew the social concerns which were foregrounded by early
modernists, throwing off established procedures and re-engaging with the
needs evident in their own environments, in Complexity and Contradiction
Venturi allowed this impetus to be forgotten, taking aesthetic diversity as an
end in itself, with no concern for political consequences. Learning from Las
Vegas later attacked what the authors called technological voodooism the
modernists fetishization of technology at the expense of other concerns.58
However, Complexity and Contradiction equally turns the aesthetic into an
idol, severing it from its social context.
Earlier I noted that Venturi is often seen as a key progenitor of
postmodernism. More broadly, among artists, writers and students who
have not undertaken their own investigations of post-war architectural

396 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

theory, the debates of this period are most often framed in terms of a
chronological transition from one paradigm to another. There is not sufficient
space to address this fully here, but the above discussion should explain
why Venturis writing has so often been seen as a step beyond or outside
of the modernist tradition. In Complexity and Contradiction he argued that
architects should leave modernism behind and take a new approach, replacing
homogenization with diversity. Like Rowe, Armajani offered something very
different. By politicizing the concept of the difficult whole and approaching
it through modernist techniques, he invited viewers to renew the potential
of the historic avant-garde rather than abandoning it. Whereas Venturis
reductive account of modernism served as a coda, closing it off to subsequent
generations, Armajani presented the modernist tradition as itself a kind of
difficult whole, with its own internal complexities and contradictions that
deserve to be worked through.

Architecture from below: Armajani and class

Thoughout this article, I have argued that Armajani took on Venturis concept
of the difficult whole and re-politicized it, demonstrating its status as a
social metaphor rather than just a mode of artistic composition. To reiterate
this claim and provide a clearer sense of its consequences, I will conclude by
examining Armajanis relationship with the politics of class struggle.
Many of Armajanis works were built using very simple carpentry
techniques, which he adopted from studying the American vernacular
tradition.59 These basic methods are always clearly evident in each finished
piece, with nails and joints left on view. This approach is perhaps deployed
most pointedly within the portico of Red School House for Thomas Paine (fig.
8), which comprises not an ensemble of classical columns and pediments, but
a simple post-and-lintel structure, totally lacking in academic credentials.
Here Armajani spurns the refined techniques of the middle and upper classes,
instead identifying with ordinary manual labourers.
To some extent, it can appear as if this reference to popular architectural
practice brings Armajani close to Venturi. In Learning from Las Vegas,
Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour also acknowledged the issue of class,
calling on architects to incorporate popular iconography into their buildings.
However, the differences between their approach and Armajanis are far
more significant than the similarities. Learning from Las Vegas argues that
modernists had built for Man rather than for people this means to
suit their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to
everyone.60 Instead, the text argues, architects should adopt motifs from
Levittown-type suburbs (mass-produced, privately sold post-war housing
developments) as a means of popularizing their work.61 This pronouncement
is deeply problematic for several reasons, not least because the authors
declared that, through their reference to suburban developments, they
sought to reassert the rights of the middle-middle class a position which

397 |Hodge: The difficult whole

they contrasted with hard-hat politics, a clear euphemism for working-class
solidarity.62 In contrast, Armajani avoided the model of consumer populism
represented by Levittown, in which standardized dwellings are sold to a
popular audience by wealthy investors. Instead, via its reference to the
vernacular, Red School House recalls older architectural practices through
which commoners constructed homes for themselves, operating outside or at
least on the edges of capitals reach. In this sense, Red School House proposes
something like a peoples history of American architecture a history from
below which, rather than encouraging charitable conciliations towards the
dispossessed, instead acknowledges their own agency as active subjects.
This difference is important because it demonstrates Armajanis eagerness
to produce the difficult whole at the level of arts social form, rather than
just its aesthetic appearance. In some senses his use of vernacular technique
seems to pull against the notion of the difficult whole, since it offers
techniques that lack individual expression, instead evoking an anonymous
collective. However, as well as being communally undertaken and socially
learned, vernacular architecture also enables individuals to build their own
homes instead of becoming beholden to architects and benefactors. In this
sense it lays the ground for individual autonomy a key condition for the
realization of the difficult whole. In other words, it offers possibilities for
constructing equality through social relationships, rather than just symbolic
representation.
Armajanis employment of the vernacular can also be understood as an
investigation into the prehistory of modernism. In 2013, he acknowledged
that various modernists including Le Corbuser were highly influenced by
American industrial architecture, itself descending from the pragmatism
of vernacular practice. As he stated, modernists were commonly drawn to
the structural self-evidence that they found in American grain elevators.63
However, while industrial and vernacular practitioners simply used
straightforward methods for reasons of functional expediency, Le Corbusier
understood the basic compositions found in grain elevators as an example
of what he called primary forms quasi-metaphysical, universal shapes,
which he equally located in Egyptian, Greek or Roman architecture.64 In other
words, he thought that such forms have an ideal, self-generating significance,
separate from their social context. In Red School House and various other
works, Armajani reverses this by dissolving his references to modernist
architecture within the techniques of vernacular practice. The specialized
products made by modernist architects are thus reintegrated into popular
history and, rather than solely being figured as a beneficiary of modern
developments, the working class is acknowledged as a crucial historical agent.
As suggested earlier, Armajanis emphasis on class as a major mode of
social exclusion also complicated the fetishization of diversity found in
Complexity and Contradiction. Whether or not we view Venturi himself as
a postmodernist, postmodernists did maintain his elevation of difference
into a totalizing demand and a universally applicable concept.65 Somewhat
paradoxically, postmodernism fetishized difference, adopting it as a salve for

398 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]

every situation, rather than addressing the particularity of varying contexts.
During the post-war period, feminism and the black power movement rightly
challenged the way in which women and people of colour had commonly
been excluded from traditional working-class organizations, such as many
trade unions. However, while this new emphasis on the intersectionality
of oppression undoubtedly brought many positive consequences, Meiksins
Wood notes that, once fetishized, the politics of diversity had the problematic
consequence of blocking any attention to class domination whatsoever.
Working-class agitation must inevitably aim to eradicate a certain form
of difference not particularity in general, but simply the gap between
oppressed and oppressing classes.66
Armajani addresses this problem in his reading and meeting gardens.
As in Learning from Las Vegas, there is a sense in which these works recall
suburbia. As Nancy Princenthal has argued, the wooden partitions featured
in Armajanis gardens seem designed to evoke picket fences perhaps the
key architectural trope in the American suburban imaginary.67 However, as
noted in the introduction, rather than acting as welcoming openings into a
domesticated space, Armajanis fences often serve as barriers, separating one
area from another and sometimes even totally blocking off parcels of land,
with no gate to enable entry. Here Levittown becomes a system of exclusions.
Such fenced-off spaces form a common trope in Armajanis practice,
also appearing in Office for Four (1981) and other works. As well as evoking
suburbia, they carry another historical resonance, recalling the enclosures of
common land that have drastically altered the spatial organization of nations
across the world since the early modern period. As Marx argued, these acts
of primitive accumulation privatized what was formerly communal space,
creating a large population of landless people, with no means of providing for
themselves precisely those who subsequently became the individualized
wage labourers of the working class, forced to sell their labour to capitalist
employers in order to make a living.68 By combining Venturis preferred
popular icon with this subtle reference to a history of disempowerment
and exploitation, Armajani reminds us that the difference constituting the
stratification of social classes is nothing to be celebrated.
While Armajani constantly creates these subtle reminders of class
oppression, he also finds hope in the form of popular agency, which he
champions in opposition to the reign of the capitalist and the specialist.
By recalling attempts to produce the difficult whole within the field
of vernacular practice, which long predate the work of modernists and
postmodernists alike, Armajani treats this concept not as the invention of
individual artists or theorists, but instead as a demand made by the masses.
Acknowledging the individual autonomy which can be enabled by communal
organization, he insists that collectivity and liberty need not be antitheses
and can instead be mutually reinforcing. Against the detractors of hard-hat
politics, Armajani thus places his faith in the people themselves. Faced with
the competitive individualization promoted by both capital and the canon,
he seeks liberation in a form of autonomous practice, which individuals learn

399 |Hodge: The difficult whole


1. Janet Kardon, Architecture/
sculpture: subject, verb, object,
in Siah Armajani: Bridges, Houses,
Communal Spaces, Dictionary For
Building (exh. cat.), Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1986,
p. 33.
2. Nancy Princenthal, Master
builder, Art in America, 74, 3, 1986,
p. 132.
3. Siah Armajani, Manifesto:
public sculpture in the context of
American democracy, Art Suisse,
February 1996, p. 78.
4. See, for example, Calvin
Tomkins, Open, available, useful,
The New Yorker, 19 March 1990, pp.
4970.
5. On Armajani calling himself
a sculptor, see Hans Ulrich Obrist,
interview with Siah Armajani,
Serpentine Gallery, London, 2012,
https://vimeo.com/53599164
(accessed 19 November 2015).
6. Siah Armajani, Interview
with Linda Shearer, in Young
American Artists: 1978 Exxon National
Exhibition (exh. cat.), Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York,
1978, pp. 1415.
7. Kardon, as at note 1, p. 35.
8. Armajani, as at note 6, pp. 1617.
9. Ibid., p. 17.
10. Siah Armajani, The glass
porch for Walter Benjamin, Critical
Inquiry, 28, 2, 2002, p. 368.
11. Armajani, as at note 6, p. 14.
12. See, for example, Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or the
cultural logic of late capitalism,
New Left Review, JulyAugust
1984, pp. 54, 80; Charles Jencks,
The New Paradigm in Architecture:
The Language of Postmodernism,
New Haven, CT, Yale University
Press, 2002, pp. 5562. For Venturi
on postmodernism, see Robert
Venturi, A bas postmodernism, of
course, in Pelagia Goulimari (ed.),
Postmodernism: What Moment?,
Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 2007, pp. 1921.
13. Robert Venturi, Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture, New
and share together. Here he seeks the difficult whole not in aesthetics, but in
social form. As Armajani put it with typically pithy humour in 2013, public art
should become art for all of the people. Pedagogies like art as self-exploration
and self expression I hate that. As soon as somebody says Im trying to
express myself, I have to take a bus.69
York, The Museum of Modern Art,
1966, p. 52.
14. Ibid., p. 24.
15. Ibid., p. 29.
16. Ibid., p. 89.
17. Ibid., pp. 89, 23.
18. Ibid., p. 86. This is a quotation
from the architect Aldo Van Eyk,
approvingly cited by Venturi.
19. Armajani, as at note 6, p. 14.
20. For example, see Venturi, as at
note 13, p. 24.
21. Denise Scott Brown, On Pop
Art, permissiveness and planning, in
Having Words, London, Architectural
Association, 2009, p. 58. Scott Brown
began collaborating with Venturi in
the early 1960s and to a large extent
they have shared an architectural
and theoretical project. To my
knowledge Armajani has never
cited her as an influence, instead
always referring to Venturi alone.
However, given her crucial role in
the formation of Venturis ideas, she
could arguably be seen as equally
significant for the development of
Armajanis practice.
22. Ibid., p. 59.
23. David Hodge, Ante-chambers
for a public to come: the critical art
of Siah Armajani, Siah Armajani,
Tehran, Bong-Gah Publications,
forthcoming.
24. Valrie Mavridorakis, From
Armajani to Sacco and Vanzetti, in
Siah Armajani: An Ingenious World
(exh. cat.), Parasol Unit, London,
2013, p. 56.
25. Obrist and Armajani, as at
note 5.
26. Princenthal, as at note 2, p. 132.
27. Venturi, as at note 13, p. 47.
28. This anecdote was related
by Simon Beeson, who worked as
Armajanis assistant during the
1990s.
29. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1867,
Part 3, Chapter 9, section 1, https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1867-c1/ch09.htm (accessed 12
August 2016).
30. Ellen Meiksins Wood,
Democracy against Capitalism,
Cambridge, Cambridge Univerity
Press, 1995, pp. 25859.
400 | Sculpture Journal 25.3 [2016]
31. Kardon, as at note 1, p. 27.
32.Ibid.
33.Ibid.
34. Michael White, De Stijl and
Dutch Modernism, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 2003,
p. 2.
35. Robert Berlind, Armajanis
open-ended structures, Art in
America, 67, 6, 1979, p. 84.
36. See Lenneke Bller and Frank
Den Oudsten, Interview with Truss
Schrder, in The Rietveld Schrder
House, London, Butterworth
Architecture, 1988, p. 56.
37. White, as at note 34, p. 131.
38. Richard Padovan, Towards
Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies, and
De Stijl, London, Routledge, 2004,
p. 140.
39.Ibid.
40. Theo Van Doesburg, Principles
of Neo-Plastic Art, London, Lund
Humphries, 1969, p. 39.
41. Ibid., p. 40. Emphasis added.
42. Theo Van Doesburg, Towards
a plastic architecture, in Hans L. C.
Jaff, De Stijl, London, Thames and
Hudson, 1970, p. 187.
43. Ibid. Emphasis added.
44. Padovan, as at note 38, p. 97.
45. Peter Brger, Theory of
the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
46. Theo Van Doesburg,
Defending the spirit of space:
against a dogmatic functionalism,
in Theo Van Doesburg: On European
Architecture, Basel, Birkhuser
Verlag, 1990, p. 91.
47. Padovan, as at note 38, p. 24.
48.Ibid.
49. One extremely useful
collection of texts in this area is K.
Michael Hays, Architecture Theory
Since 1968, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, 1998.
50. Colin Rowe, Introduction to
five architects, in Hays, as at note 49,
pp. 7576.
51. Ibid., pp. 7475.
52. Kenneth Frampton, The status
of Man and the status of his objects,
in Hays, as at note 49, p. 370.
53. See Ross Wolfe, The
sociohistoric mission of modernist
architecture, The Charnel House,
20 September 2011, http://
thecharnelhouse.org/2011/09/20/
the-sociohistoric-mission-of-
modernist-architecture-the-housing-
shortage-the-urban-proletariat-and-
the-liberation-of-woman/ (accessed
24 September 2015).
54. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, 1976, pp. 10001.
55. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott
Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning
from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, rev. edn, 1977, p. xiii.
56. Ibid., p. xii.
57. See, for example, ibid., p. 148.
58. Ibid., p. 150.
59. Janet Kardon, Siah Armajani,
American observer and visionary,
in Siah Armajani: An Ingenious World
(exh. cat.), Parasol Unit, London,
2013, p. 66.
60. Venturi et al., as at note 55,
p. 154.
61. Ibid., pp. 15455.
62. Ibid., p. 155. Also problematic is
their statement that the aesthetics of
Levittown suburbs could adequately
represent black as well as white. This
is strongly contradicted by the fact
that African Americans have always
been under-represented in these
communities, not least because
some were initially only open to
white residents. See Peter Bacon
Hales, Levittowns palimpsest:
colored skin, in Outside the Gates of
Eden, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 2014, pp. 11320.
63. Kardon, as at note 59, p. 66.
64. Le Corbusier, Towards a
New Architecture, London, Dover
Publications, 1986, p. 29.
65. Meiksins Wood, as at note 30.
66.Ibid.
67. Princenthal, as at note 2, p. 131.
68. See Marx, as at note 29,
Part 7, Chapter 26, The secret of
primitive accumulation, https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1867-c1/ch26.htm (accessed 12
August 2016).
69. Siah Armajani, lecture at
Parasol Unit, London, 19 September
2013.