Irony is not just one topic amongst many in architecture. It is a subject which readily aligns architecture with theory, and thus intellectually channels access to our discipline in a particular light. Neither an attribute of architectural form that one can catch by looking at it in a state of distraction, nor a set structure of discourse, nor accessible to casual apperception, irony requires a “learned” understanding and interpretation of the relation and discrepancies between percept and concept. “The whole work (of irony) is a permanent struggle to represent the unrepresentable”[1] Friedrich Schlegel claimed when he concocted his literary fragments, and proposed, in order to escape the aporetic impasse this ambition produces, that “it is equally deadly for the mind to have a system, and not to have one. It will just have to decide to combine both.”[2] In architecture, the notion mostly hinges on architecture’s double reality as a thing, on the one hand, and as a set of ideas, on the other. Beyond an acute ability to read and articulate architectural form, it presupposes a grasp of architecture’s history, its cultural and intellectual contexts, as well as the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of discourse. Irony in architecture animates the relation between things and ideas as if the ontological difference was obfuscated in a paradoxical, yet intellectually engaging way. The conceptual focus on the tectonic dialectic between thingness and ideality turns architecture itself into a form of theory. And so on the most general level, the focus on theory is what makes the topic of irony in architecture intellectually stimulating and edifying.
Certain periods of history were particularly prone to double readings, for they emphasized the self-reflective mise-en-relation with concepts not readily contained in architectural form or texts, but alluded to. This circumstance accentuates cultivation and scholarship over originality and innovation, and occasionally earned irony the incrimination of conservatism. Yet the shrewd cheekiness and chutzpah that has often accompanied its erudite expressions has generally safeguarded irony from being reactionary. That said, irony has its own generative mechanisms which shun a creation ex nihilo.
The reckoning with the tradition emanating from North Italian humanism has a certain presence in many an argument on architectural irony—from the mannerist shenanigans on the classical revival of the Antique, like in Giulio Romano’s formal tinkering at the Palazzo del Te, to the romanticist fascination with the imaginary ruins of an unspecified past, like in Giambattista Piranesi’s depictions of the Carceri d’inventione. In this history of architectural theory, the postmodern stands out as a period of heightened self-consciousness; it is also the period that has, more than any other, built its arguments on the conceptual quicksand of irony. Notwithstanding the complicated socio-political and cultural contexts postmodern thought emerged from, its protagonists had the weighty legacy of twentieth century modernism to engage. A good portion of the postmodern argumentation had internalised this sort of relational polemic as a primordial paradox which defined its concepts and line of reasoning. I maintain elsewhere that irony encapsulates the very structure of postmodern theory in architecture.
As such, in the early 1980s, Frank Gehry began to express an interest in the geometric and metaphorical possibilities of the fish shape as a fundamental configurational paradigm for architecture; his was precisely a critique of the humanist prerequisite of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism of the classical tradition. In short, if the articulated, hierarchical, and tripartite body of the Vitruvian Man could be replaced with the scaled, streamlined shape of fish, architecture would be spawned freely and afresh. While Gehry brought fresh meat to the table of the architectural discussion, so to speak, its discursive efficacy derived from the rebuttal of everything that came before. It was this rudimental negation of architecture’s fundamentals, formulated from within the discipline, which interestingly, generated a new universe of forms that, in many ways, foreshadowed a radical shift towards a new formal paradigm: A decade later, the notions of smooth and topological form, of self-similar repetition and difference of shapes, or of the curved stringing together of structural segments would dominate the discussions around computer modelling and digital fabrication. The humorous and absurd manifestation of Gehry’s proposition, sometimes in concord with Claes Oldenburg, was of course part and parcel of this discursive strategy.
Three examples can illustrate how internalized irony operated in postmodernism—one relying on quotational distancing from modernism; one on self-referentiality; and the third one on the “ingenious” reading of an urban text. All three examples epitomise the complex intertwining of perceptual and conceptual realities of architecture, and make the architectural "thing” itself into a support for theory:
The first example is by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, who had designed his Little House in the Clouds (1976) in open reference to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951), by making use of the latter’s architectural attributes only to re-enact them in a state of self-negation or self-cancelation. While Mies’s house is composed of a single, asymmetrical, and extroverted volume, Tigerman’s is sliced into a double mass across an introspective mirror line; whereas Mies’s house is raised off the ground on a platform, Tigerman’s is sunken into a ditch only to be raised again on small pilotis to the original level of the ground; and while Mies has peripheral windows to link the interior of his house horizontally to the surrounding countryside, Tigerman privileges the internalized, vertical view; this interior vista is directed towards the “artificial nature” of a trompe l’oeil fresco of clouds, which are painted on the house’s ceiling with no actual window in the whole house. The Jewish Tigerman saw in these formalist games, played in relation to the architecture of the catholic Mies, a whole dialogical cosmology between what he called Hellenic versus Hebraic cultures. It was this architect’s way to express his cultural diaspora as a Jew in America, negotiating his anachronistic love/hate relationship with the corporate architecture in the Midwestern city of Chicago that had, by his own account, been “invaded by the Germans”—Miesianism modernism. A multitude of cultural cross-references, from Kierkegaard to Bakhtin, from Freud to Lacan, from Schinkel to Magritte, are being woven into the discussion of architectural form up to the moment when this piece of design is turned into a book of existentialism. Tigerman’s Little House is not simply a piece of architectural design, but the instantiation of a dialectic theory about rival worldviews.
The second example is Peter Eisenman’s House VI (1976): The project is predicated on a spatial diagram, which Eisenman duplicated, only to turn the twin diagram on its head, and nest it in the original drawing. While the first diagram has a conventional relationship to gravity, the turned-around twin becomes a referential sign or symbol set against the gravitational field. The entire formal complexity of the house is then created through this mechanism of playful self-reflexivity between the initial drawing and its inverted double: As such, the stair that ascends to the upper floor is mirrored by the “sign” of a stair which is suspended from the ceiling. Similarly, while certain columns act as conventional supports, others “negate” gravity by hanging from above, and hovering above the ground. The architecture of House VI hinges on this sort of self-reflexive and self-negating dialectic syntax; as such, the house is a manifesto for a weltanschauung that plays pragmatism off against ideality. It is also a built manifesto against the Vitruvian principles of architecture: indeed, not all columns in a building are reducible to firmitas, utilitas, and even venustas, such is the argument, but they can represent “other” realities that are completely internal and proper to architecture. House VI is an instance of built theory.
And the third example is Rem Koolhaas’s proposition in Delirious New York (1978), where Koolhaas sees Manhattan, the city of pragmatism and rationality, simultaneously as its dialogical other, namely as a “city of poetry.” The implication is that all opposite meanings converge when taken to extremes : As such, the “problem” of excessive congestion in the metropolis is turned into a specific “culture” of congestion. When a pragmatic problem becomes so overwhelming that it cannot effectively be remedied, then a changed cultural mindset about that same problem can sublimate it into a new aesthetic and a changed mentality. In the book Koolhaas also argues that the built structure of Manhattan exemplifies that the two big adversary ideological and political systems in the world—Soviet communism and American capitalism—have finally coalesced into the same architectural typology : the symbolic high-rise building, which has been developed analogously in Moscow and in New York. Furthermore, in his “Story of the Pool,” Koolhaas imagines the high-rise-turned-horizontal as a long swimming city precinct, a horizontal skyscraper, which becomes a dynamic battleground and trait d'union between Western and Soviet urbanisms. Ironically, the claim is that opposite ideologies can be represented by the very same architecture, because architecture allegedly has the capacity to absorb and embody ideological contradictions. Here again, the postmodern tale about urban architecture is a theoretical proposition.
Notwithstanding its occasional penchant for superficial aesthetics—so-called POMO, the postmodern was a fundamentally philosophical and literary theory movement, with architecture as its figurehead. Extending the conceptual preoccupations of postmodernism, DECON from the mid-to-late 1980s then marked the apex of irony when architectural theory turned its intellectual query against the material foundations of architecture itself :
When buildings began to simulate their own disintegration and decay, architecture had unmasked the internal quarrel and questioning, and unconcealed its lasting theory-envy on the battlefield of architectural form. Eisenman turned to Jacques Derrida to figure out the surreptitious specters of architecture’s philosophy through formalism; together, they published a series of discussion transcripts entitled Chora L Works. The discourses of architecture and philosophy became so totally entangled that, on the one hand, the philosopher, Derrida, began to take on responsibility to shape architecture by claiming “I will stop apologizing for not being an architect,” to which the architect Eisenman denigrated his own authority and responded “… And I will stop apologizing for not being an architect.”[3] In the context of architects turning to philosophy, Bernard Tschumi invoked Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan to address an alleged dark subconscious of architecture, which had been suppressed by the inherent violence of architecture’s positive, optimistic, beautiful, and “constructive” halo. A blow to the phenomenological bias of the vulgar, non-theoretical apperception of the beauty of architecture by the general public, DECON ventured to frustrate bourgeois contentment by exhibiting that architecture was not a sphere for the gentrification of lifestyles—a sort of art “deco," but a stage for the display of the discipline’s internal dialectic and doubt. To oppose the apathy and happy numbness of the status quo, architecture unleashed a certain diabolical energy in a formalist and spatial drama. Historically speaking, DECON was one of those moments when architecture most expressively, and ironically, exhibited the fundamental incongruities between its materialism (“the brick”) and its metaphysics (“doubt”).
Since architecture’s “digital turn” in the early-to-mid 1990s, however, the concern with the meaning, symbolism, critique, and hermeneutics of architecture has been perceived as unnecessarily arcane, and has given way to other thematic preoccupations in the field. When digital technology became ubiquitous for the conception and transmission of ideas, the focus of architectural discourse shifted towards generative practices that were mostly pragmatic and technological in nature. They moved away from the reflective, critical, and dialectic modes which had largely defined it throughout the postmodern and poststructuralist decades, towards the more straightforward experimentation with new fabrication techniques, the digital generation of form, as well as with the prolific dissemination of images. Discourse experienced a both literal and metaphorical “flattening” by moving its battleground onto the digital screen: on the one hand, the physicality of architecture found itself converted into immaterial lines on flat screens; and on the other, the discussion among architects manifested an outright impatience with ideas that were not directly geared towards stirring a software response. The dominant topics of discussion almost exclusively pivoted around the generation and manipulation of form —folding, emergence, topology, hyper surfacing, nonlinearity— while theory turned to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuzianism in architecture felt serious, obsessive, and cult-like; for sure, the formalisms and philosophies of “smoothness” were a territory in which the dialectical schisms of irony had no place. While the 1990s were doubtlessly the pioneering decade for digital modelling, in which the “all-to-serious” experimentation with the new media was taking place, its cultural spark had happened in critical debates which preceded those years.
Likewise, in the first two decades of our century, neither theory nor irony were necessarily much en vogue in architecture. The development of social media platforms changed the protocols of communication altogether : it enabled spontaneous, individualistic, and direct expression, where discourse lost much of its procedural formalism, its diplomacy, and many a time, its decorum. It got replaced with an ongoing buzz where every social media user is individually given the public stage to broadcast opinion, view, sentiment, belief, suspicion, theory. The ubiquitous availability of miscellaneous “content” has relativized the authority of the institutions, which traditionally framed, safeguarded, and peer-reviewed access to ideas. Individual posts are competing with official news channels and have become a conduit for the impulsive, informal expression of political opinion. In a way, the resulting cacophony is heterogeneous to a point where it lacks a common epistemological basis against which any of the subtle effects of irony would be discernible. Along these lines, in the last decades, the discipline of architecture too has digressed from its intellectual preoccupancy and found itself more concerned with performative than with reflective activity.
This modus operandi was aligned with the explosive expansion of the new urban agglomerations in Asia and the Middle East, from Dubai to Shenzhen, and have been decidedly progressivist without, however, really resuscitating the pioneering spirit that had characterized the 1950s or the utopian zeal of the 1960s. This hyper development came hand in hand with an almost inevitable pragmatist ideology that remained incurious about excessive disciplinary introspection. The unapologetically “modern” drive has rendered architecture self-assured in its procedures but has deflected from self-questioning and self-doubt — more generally, it has to a large extent suspended disciplinary self-reflection.
When the party came to an end around 2020, when sanitary, ecological, financial and geopolitical crises piled up, a certain introspection has come to impose itself again upon society at large, and the discipline of architecture in particular. It appears as if the extreme urgencies of the Covid crisis, the inflation crisis, the migration crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and the climate crisis have unleashed the “raw real,” in the face of which mankind’s theories, dreams and hopes come across as ineffective romantic reverie. These urgencies already triggered the realist instinct where even a humanist discipline like architecture gets instrumentalized “to fix the problems at hand” with the revival of an utterly flat pragmatism.
However, one can assume that the intellectual response to a “real” existential threat also reopens space for the drama of irony—though in ways that differ from its previous (postmodern and other) versions. This time round, irony is not literary and semantic in kind; facing this alleged eruption of the raw real, one can expect to be facing a Nietzschean “world-historical irony,” which is based on the suspicion that a cunning divinity is keeping its finger in the great game of the world, and uses humans as its plaything. We find ourselves yet again in a place where we have to evaluate the relation between our discipline’s intrinsically constructive and forward-looking underpinning (“You cannot believe in the bomb and be an architect”), and the desire to be relevant by addressing the predicaments of the zeitgeist. Allegedly, these testing times are therefore inherently fertile grounds for irony.
Without yet being able to fully comprehend its effects today, one can nevertheless begin to pinpoint a few seedbeds for contemporary irony, of which I identify three :
For one, the development of the notion of post-humanism has altered human self-perception; the technological possibilities to interfere with, or modify bodies and minds alike, are fundamentally probing every traditional theory about what it means to be human. When limbs can be replaced or expanded with prostheses, neurons can connect to electronic chips, sex and gender can be changed and rendered fluid, and artificial intelligence can compete with its natural counterpart, there should be ample room for new forms of irony! In the creative and critical disciplines, this broad revision of the value and place of human agency has thus already opened up new domains for dialectics. For the biological body will always remain as a “conservative” reference point or shadow from which the post-human improvements derive and depend. Post-humanism is not only an evolutive modification of humanist assumptions, but it is also a form of self-negation from within humanist theory itself. And architecture will not be immune to this evolution; given the multiple and repeated enmeshments of architecture with biological metaphors, which by far exceed the classical arguments about bodily proportion, organization, or profile, any tinkering with that fundamental paradigm will open a space for the whole spectrum of irony—from existentialist to humorous. In particular, the difficulty to clearly separate subjects from objects when objects have already become sentient, responsive, and (artificially) smart, holds a large potential for new dialectic.
A second hotbed for contemporary irony appears in mankind’s relation to the Anthropocene, the environment and the climate. Torn between the realisation that action is needed to avoid fatal catastrophe from the careless over-exploitation of resources, on the one hand, and the inexplicable persistent disbelief in the scientific evidence, humanity finds itself suspended in a new dialectic, which, in cinema, was portrayed in a a most wonderfully ironic and satirical film Don’t Look Up.[4] The film shows how world opinion has become divided among people who believe that a comet, which is on collision course with the earth, is a severe threat, those who decry alarmism and believe that mining a destroyed comet will create jobs, and those who deny that the comet even exists. The film stands as a satirical take on the human handling of evidence about the climate crisis, and the divide between thought and deed in this respect. Today’s ironies tend to scheme with the discrepancies between those sophisticated technological, political and other systems of control that mankind has itself designed and implemented, on the one hand, and the sensation of total loss of human control in face of those same systems. It is the tale of the apprentice sorcerer reloaded as one of the central leitmotifs for contemporary irony. In architecture, Liam Young’s recent project Great Endeavor thematises the dichotomy of the fatal and absolute human subjugation by climate change, on the one hand, and the visionary fiction of total human control through technology, on the other. Young dreams up a world which will, by his own account, “involve the construction of the largest engineering project in human history, and the development of a new infrastructure equivalent in size to that of the entire global fossil fuel industry.“[5] His take on the future of the planet hovers between a profligate optimism and a daunting outlook onto the future; the project sits on the sublime borderline between earnestness and frivolity. Though deprived of any ostensible humor, the project does play with the Janus-faced outfall of human intervention at planetary scale: In a sort of ironic reversal, Young suggests that if humanity repeated its extreme effort of industrialisation, we would get it right the second time round.
A third breeding ground for contemporary irony is to be found in the sphere of socio-politics, which has seen of late the rise of populism. The anti-establishment stances of populism across countries, from the United States to Argentina, and from France to Italy, are the most striking symptom of the attempt to do away with the “high grounds” of democracy that are perceived as abstract and elitist. It appears as if the extreme urgencies of the latest crises could no longer afford the long, tedious, and formalist processes of democracy. As such, the pandemic forced health authorities to weigh the duration of their safety testing protocols against the speed of the vaccines’ market launch; the strong migration flows have triggered the nationalist clinging to a fabricated golden age when things were simple, direct, and great; and a new cohort of protestors, from Last Generation to Tyre Extinguishers, has felt legitimate to suspend the rule of law in view of the alleged imminence of climate collapse. What tends to be forgotten in the current situation is that the democratic formalisms emanate from the social contract on which our modern civilisations have been constructed — a contract that is endemic to culture, language, and social interaction in general. And for sure, all things cultural tend to be labyrinthine and manifold, and therefore irreducible to a simple way of talking. If the 20th century was the era when formal socio-political institutions were erected in the name of upholding the complexities of the “social contract”—international courts of justice, global trade treaties, geopolitical military alliances— the 21st century has started to enact their undoing in a weird conceptual short circuit. If one can assume that “all architecture is political” in that it has a millennia-long history of instantiating underlying power relationships, the current self-negation of democratic principles from within the Western (democratic) regimes will bring forth this embedded irony — either in the way our buildings are interpreted, designed and represented, or in the way in which humans behave because of these same buildings.
If the introductory suggestion of this essay remains plausible, i.e. that irony hinges on architecture’s double reality as a thing, on the one hand, and as a set of ideas, on the other, then the current tumultuous times should be fertile ground for irony’s return after having been dormant since postmodernism. As a matter of fact, when architecture’s enduring or classical clichés of stability, serenity, durability, confidence, and optimism will again be confronted with the primordial component of thinking —questioning— we are about to enter a new “theory” moment for architectural discourse.