Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.  Posthumanism is an aesthetic and epistemological response to technological modernization. It embraces the anti-individualist consequences of technological progress and, in the case of Hannes Meyer, attempts to turn the perceptual effects of modernity to explicitly collectivist sociopolitical ends. But, as the case of Hilberseimer shows, posthumanism also harbors a contradiction - the ecstatic surrender of the subject to he very forces that assure its dissolution.  Situating his analysis within the wider domain of artistic practices and the history of the subject - as well as in relation to architects such as Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier - Hays raises questions of considerable relevance to contemporary arguments about the ideological underpinnings of urban and architectural projects long rejected as antihumanist.  K. Michael Hays is Associate Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is the founder and editor of Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture.

Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer

Arts & Photography

Hays, K. Michael

Architecture

Mit Pr

Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective.
While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general theory of that ethos. Now, in Architecture's Desire, K. Michael Hays writes an account of the “late avant-garde” as an architecture systematically twisting back on itself, pondering its own historical status, and deliberately exploring architecture's representational possibilities right up to their absolute limits. In close readings of the brooding, melancholy silence of Aldo Rossi, the radically reductive “decompositions” and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman, the carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk, and the “cinegrammatic” delirium of Bernard Tschumi, Hays narrates the story of architecture confronting its own boundaries with objects of ever more reflexivity, difficulty, and intransigence.
The late avant-garde is the last architecture with philosophical aspirations, an architecture that could think philosophical problems through architecture rather than merely illustrate them. It takes architecture as the object of its own reflection, which in turn produces an unrelenting desire. Using the tools of critical theory together with the structure of Lacan's triad imaginary-symbolic-real, Hays constructs a theory of architectural desire that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.

Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-garde (Writing Architecture)

MIT Press]

Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. 
Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.

From his geodesic dome to books popularizing the terms spaceship earth” and synergetics,” the life mission of R. Buckminster Fuller (18951983) was to create living environments that minimized consumption of the earth’s resources while maximizing interconnections with global systems of information and transportation. This book explores Fuller's extraordinary body of work focusing on his wide-ranging and sometimes controversial role within the worlds of art, architecture, and utopian thought.
The book chronicles Fuller’s profound, often prophetic contributions, including his environmentally sensitive building designs. The essays illuminate the underappreciated thematic interactions of many sculptors, painters, musicians, and architects with this self-described comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” including contemporary artists wrestling with Fuller’s legacy today.
Reproductions of original drawings and modelsincluding those for Fuller’s 4D house, Wichita House, the Montreal Expo dome, and the sole extant Dymaxion carplus a reprinted 1966 New Yorker profile on Fuller by Calvin Tomkins, complete the fascinating tribute.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

Miller, Dana

Individual Artists

Yale University Press

John Hejduk (1929-2000) was one of the most original figures in American architecture and design. Best known for his visionary works and his influence upon graduates of The Cooper Union, New York, where he was dean for twenty-five years, Hejduk largely abstained from conventional practice, focusing instead on theoretical projects, usually in the form of drawings that were combined into poetic, highly personal narratives. Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk highlights the architect's later work, in which he made successive attempts to shift his architecture away from the mathematical concerns of his earlier work - which had owed much to Mies van der Rohe and Mondrian - toward an allegorical, carnivalesque mode that he called architectural "masques." In these works, Hejduk presented his architecture in a more lyrical, painterly, and narrative way, and in the last of the works - including Enclosures, a suite of thirty-two drawings reproduced here in its entirety - returned architecture to an overtly spiritual function. The works display a stylistic range from basic geometric forms and elemental biomorphism (buildings that seem to have hair, beaks, eyes, and legs) to typological variations on theaters, periscopes, traps, chapels, and labyrinths. Employing allegorical images of angels, animals, martyrs, and machines, these works explore themes of falls from grace, itinerancy, passage and transformation, and above all, architecture as sanctuary - for art, for culture, for enduring rituals, for the human spirit itself.

Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART.

For almost two decades the work of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti has remained at the forefront of theoretical production. Their rigorously?detailed and exquisitely drawn projects characterize an attitude of?aesthetic realism towards materials, construction, function, and the?cultural role of architecture. Yet the conditions they address, and the?effects they produce, are unprecedented. Their projects synthesize?seemingly incompatible images, uses, and typologies.?
?Unprecedented Realism is not an illustration of theory. Rather,?what emerges is a constructive theory of architecture that understands the process of design itself as a distinct mode of knowledge --?as theoretical research that is still irreducibly architectural.?
?Unprecedented Realism presents both buildings and urban?infrastructures: Steps of Providence, RI; Entrance for Cranbrook,?Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Carnegie-Mellon University Center, Pittsburgh;?Pershing Square, Los Angeles; and Times Square, New York City.?
?Along with the analytic text of K. Michael Hays, the volume includes?critical essays by Alan Colquhoun, George Baird, Farès el-Dahdah,?and Rodolphe el-Khoury (please see the Table of Contents).

Unprecedented Realism

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Princeton Architectural Press

Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture

Princeton Architectural Pr

For almost two decades the work of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti has remained at the forefront of theoretical production. Their rigorously detailed and exquisitely drawn projects characterize an attitude of aesthetic realism towards materials, construction, function, and the cultural role of architecture. Yet the conditions they address, and the effects they produce, are unprecedented. Their projects synthesize seemingly incompatible images, uses, and typologies.Unprecedented Realism is not an illustration of theory. Rather, what emerges is a constructive theory of architecture that understands the process of design itself as a distinct mode of knowledge—as theoretical research that is still irreducibly architectural.Unprecedented Realism presents both buildings and urban infrastructures: Steps of Providence, RI; Entrance for Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Carnegie-Mellon University Center, Pittsburgh; Pershing Square, Los Angeles; and Times Square, New York City.Along with the analytic text of K. Michael Hays, the volume includes critical essays by Alan Colquhoun, George Baird, Far s el-Dahdah, and Rodolphe el-Khoury (please see the Table of Contents).

Unprecedented Realism: The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti

Anyone interested in the intersection of theory and practice in?architecture will appreciate the insight offered by Hejduk's?Chronotope. With essays by Stan Allen, Peggy Deamer, K. Michael Hays,?Catherine Ingraham, Detlef Mertins, Edward Mitchell, and Robert Somol, the?volume examines today's tendency towards theoretical production, as?exemplified by John Hejduk, known for his ventures outside the realm of?the practical.?
?Hejduk, the Dean of the School of?Architecture at The Cooper Union,?has created a unique body of theoretical work: publications such as Mask?of Medusa; and small-scale constructions such as his compelling "masques,"?structures that fall between architecture, scenography, sculpture, and?poetry. Additionally, Hejduk has several built works to his name-housing?in Berlin and a renovation of The Cooper Union-which display the same?themes and tectonics as his theoretical creations.

Hejduk's Chronotope

K. Michael Hays: Appearance & Materiality / Aparición y materialidad

Ediciones ARQ

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hays, K. Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hays, K. Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hays, K. Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer

Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-garde (Writing Architecture)

Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk

Unprecedented Realism

Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture

Unprecedented Realism: The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti

Hejduk's Chronotope

K. Michael Hays: Appearance & Materiality / Aparición y materialidad