On the study of prearchitecture that took place after WWII.
Can there ever be a world before architecture? Is there an
arche--origin, beginning, or authority--that precedes the appearance
of architectonics? This book argues that such a pre-architectural
state became a central object of investigation by architectural
historians and practicing architects in the aftermath of world
historical events and major epistemological revolutions.
Confronted by the ravages of war and omens of modern architecture's own
ending, architects like Frederick Kiesler tried to trace the origins of
human design by exploring the foundational techniques of human and
animal building through conversation with paleoanthropologists and
evolutionary biologists of the first half of the twentieth-century. At
the same time, historians like Sigfried Giedion attempted to reinterpret
a number of recently discovered prehistoric monuments, if only to
corroborate theoretical principles that were already in use by modernist
art and architectural critics.
After WWII, the narrative of Prearchitecture moves progressively
backwards to the middle of the nineteenth century when the term
"prearchitectonic" was coined even before the institutional emergence of
prehistory as a discipline of scientific research. Gottfried Semper
wrote about the "prearchitectonic conditions" of peoples from eras
preceding the historical civilizations of the Near East, expressed
through smaller structures such as ceramics but not yet through
monumental structures. For Semper, "prearchitectonic" elements described
not a single temporal period but a general structural condition that
survived the inventions of history and of architecture.
Ultimately, the study of prehistoric origins could uncover not only the
causes of modernity's present crisis, but also the signs of
architecture's futures past. By juxtaposing the fossils of prehistory
with postwar cosmic anxieties and prognostications of a post-histoire,
what is ultimately invented is a pre/post/erous history--a fictional
prehistory of future architectonics. Pre-architecture is not simply
"not architecture;" it is what architecture could have become but
ultimately disavowed. The same unfulfilled potentialities haunt not only
the distant past but also architecture's anxious present that
periodically circles back to an aborted prehistory.
