دانلود مقاله ترجمه شده از بریکولاژ تا اسطوره، یا چگونه هامپتی و دامپتی را دوباره بهم رساند

Criticism occupies the no-man’s-land between enthusiasm and doubt, between poetic sympathy and analysis. Its purpose is not, except in rare cases, either to eulogize or condemn, and it can never grasp the essence of the work it discusses. It must try to get behind the work’s apparent originality and expose its ideological framework without turning it into a mere tautology. This applies particularly to the work of Michael Graves, with its appearance of being sui generis and its sensitivity to outside influences which it immediately absorbs into its own system. This essay, therefore, will attempt to discuss his work in terms of these broad contexts: the American tradition, the tradition of modern architecture, and the classical tradition. It is not suggested that a discussion of his work in these terms exhausts its meaning. It merely provides a rough and ready scaffold—a way of approaching the work obliquely.

Graves’s work is so clearly related to the international Modern Movement that it is at first sight difficult to see in it any reference to purely American traditions. But some of the ways in which it differs (and differs profoundly) from European interpretations of the Modern Movement seem to be traceable to specifically American sources. Graves’s apparent rejection of modern architecture as a social instrument—and his insistence that architecture communicates with individuals and not classes—does not operate in a social void. His work is made possible by social conditions which are probably unique to the United States at the present moment (though they existed in Europe between 1890 and 1930). The chief of these is the existence of a type of client (whether institutional or private) which regards the architect not only as a technician who can solve functional problems, or satisfy a more or less pre-formulated and predictable set of desires, but also as an arbiter of taste. In this role he is called upon not only to decide matters of decorum; like the modern painter, he is expected to say something “new,” to propound a philosophy. No doubt this only applies to a minority of clients (and even these are probably often puzzled at the results), but their very existence explains how an architect as intensely “private” as Michael Graves can insert himself within the institutionalized framework of society despite the absence of a clearly defined “market.” If his work reflects a nostalgia for “culture” which is characteristically American, and which, as Manfredo Tafuri has pointed out,1 can be traced back at least to the City Beautiful movement, it depends on the existence of a type of client who has similar—though less well defined—aspirations. In Europe the critique of a materialistic modern architecture has usually taken place under the banner of a betrayed populism. It is perhaps only in America that it could be launched in the name of intellectual culture. Certainly the importance in Graves’s work of the French tradition—its assimilation, initially through the example of Le Corbusier, of the Beaux Arts discipline of the plan—has its origins in a purely American tradition going back to Richardson and McKim