Joan Ockman: Here Is Architecture!

Here is Architecture! The function of representation and the representation of function in the works and thoughts of Adolf Loos, Horatio Greenough, and Louis Sullivan

A postcard found after the death of Adolf Loos among his documents is the starting point for tracing the early path of this Viennese architect to the United States (from 1893 to 1896), revealing his encounters with American culture and also looking at two interrelated themes that are central to his work and thinking: the monument and the ornament. Loos's contribution to the competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower has been endlessly historically interpreted for nearly a century but retains a sense of mystery. The lecture will offer an additional genealogy of Loos's monumental Doric column and interpret it as an indicator or representative symbol of what was once called "Architecture." Other protagonists in this story are the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, known for his aphorism "form follows function," who is likely Loos's alter ego, and Louis Sullivan, who is, on the contrary, his diametrical opposite. The lecture connects these historical themes together for the purpose of reflecting on contemporary issues of representation and function in architecture.

Joan Ockman has been considering Adolf Loos since the early 1980s when she edited the American edition of the book Spoken into the Void – a collection of Loos's essays that appeared in the Oppositions Books series. She is a historian, critic, and professor of architecture, currently teaching as a Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and also as a Visiting Professor at Cooper Union and Cornell University School of Architecture. For more than two decades, she was a member of the faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where from 1994 to 2008 she served as the director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Additionally, she has taught at Harvard, Yale, the Berlage Institute, and the Architectural Association, among others. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in the mid-1970s, where, in addition to being the editor of Oppositions Books, she was also the editor of the journal Oppositions. She is the author of extensively researched writings on modern and contemporary architecture, having edited books such as Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012); Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention (2002); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2000); and the award-winning anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993). She is currently completing a collection of her essays titled Architecture Among Other Things, which is set to be published next year by Actar.

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