Joan Ockman: Here Is Architecture!

A picture postcard found among Adolf Loos’s papers after his death is the point of departure for retracing the Viennese architect’s early journey to the United States in 1893–96, his encounter with American culture, and two intertwined themes that remain central to his work and thought: monument and ornament. Loos’s entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower competition has received no end of historical interpretation over the course of almost a century, but still remains enigmatic. This lecture offers yet another genealogy for his monumental Doric column, reading it as a marker or placeholder for something once called “Architecture.” Among other protagonists in this story are the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, best-known for the aphorism “form follows function” and arguably Loos’s alter ego, and Louis Sullivan, his diametric opposite. The lecture weaves these historical threads together for purposes of reflecting on contemporary issues of representation and function in architecture.

Joan Ockman has been thinking about Adolf Loos since the early 1980s, when she edited the American edition of Spoken into the Void, a collection of his essays that appeared in the Oppositions Books series. An architectural historian, critic, and educator, Ockman is currently Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Visiting Professor at Cooper Union and Cornell University School of Architecture. Formerly a member of the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for over two decades, she served as director of its Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1994 to 2008. She has also held teaching appointments at Harvard, Yale, the Berlage Institute, and the Architectural Association, among other schools. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in the mid-1970s, where, in addition to editing Oppositions Books, she was an editor of Oppositions journal. Author of wide-ranging writings on modern and contemporary architecture, her edited books include Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012); Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention (2002); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2000); and the award-winning Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993). She is currently completing a collection of her essays titled Architecture Among Other Things, to be published next year by Actar.