![]() ![]() Publication forthcoming in 2017.Pritzker Military Archives Center Photo by Bob Elmore “On 9H: The relationship between institutions and discursive formations.” Paper presented at The Site of Discourse: Thinking Architecture Through Publication, Lisbon, Portugal, 30 September 2015. Informed by Foucauldian concepts of 'institution' and 'discursive formation', this paper coins and puts to work the term 'institutional artefact' to answer the following complex questions at the interface of the theoretical and the material: Does 9H display a singular discourse or a discourse of debate? Is 9H serving the pedagogical aims of the institution or rather cultivating an external audience? In so exploring, this paper hopes to achieve two things: first, to demonstrate that the British empiricist mission of the 1980s represents an aim to create a cultural language for architecture in the face of commercial and pedagogical pressures and second, to reveal the methodological implications of institutional discursive formations versus the presence of individual figures that arise from the study of an institutional artefact as a site of discourse. From this critical paradigm, this essay takes as its case study the UCL-produced architectural journal 9H, and considers it against a number of empirical concepts. In the 1980s, which I define as a second-generation of post-modern architectural discourse, practitioners and theorists in London embarked on an empiricist mission in the revision and publication of Eurocentric theory from the Enlightenment to post-modernism. The rise in production of institutional artefacts coincided with the onset of postmodernism in an attempt to reclaim pedagogy as the medium for architectural and urbanist experimentation. ![]() This conference, entitled 'The Site of Discourse', focuses squarely on this relationship between the constructive, corporeal practising of architecture and its symbolic, incorporeal representation in the architectural magazine. In light of shifting disciplinary structures, critical examination of the relationship between school-affiliated institutional magazines (or 'institutional artefacts'), and their representation of extraneous, third-party architectural production is of increasing importance to scholarship. This essay argues that, rather than being considered an agent of privatisation in a declining public sphere, Jahn’s building could equally well serve to counter generic claims about postmodern privatising urbanism. ![]() While Jahn’s career soared in the wake of its construction, the State of Illinois Centre is much less celebrated than other projects he completed around the same time, such as the United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare Airport (1983–87). Occupying a highly visible site, it was designed to renew the public profile of the state and its activities with an attractive (in all senses of the word) building. Describing the building in the Inland Architect, he declared it ‘a new typology for an urban office building’ created from the synthesis of historical styles. Seeking a striking visual identity for the important commission, Jahn returned to the beaux-arts practice of form-making, creating a volume derived from the different programmatic elements and deformed by the various pressures on the square site, clothing it in the transparent curtain wall that had become the Chicago vernacular. Though formally innovative, the State of Illinois Centre followed the modernist model created by Daley, in which public authorities commissioned iconic buildings from prominent Chicago architecture firms in order to generate urban renewal in the form of private development. Daley’s plan to shore up the historic core of downtown Chicago. Thompson Center) was intended as a catalyst for the revival of the North Loop, the final component of Mayor Richard J. Short and squat, Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Centre 1987 (now known as the James R. ![]()
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