Abstract

At a time when architecture is beginning to play a more definitive role in contemporary theoretical debates, there is, for those who find themselves outside the purview of architecture "proper," great confusion precisely over that role and how it is configured, or to be configured, within the larger domain of contemporary cultural production. This dissertation attempts to address that issue by reexamining the problem of architectural ideology, which has been dominated by the work of Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri. Concentrating on Tafuri's influential Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, I develop a more flexible model of architectural ideology by reexamining Louis Althusser's famous model of ideology. Though fraught with its own complex, and finally self-destructive, relationship to science, Althusser's account of ideology offers, unlike Tafuri's static, cybernetic model, a dynamic model based on the state's desire to legitimate its own hegemony. With this Althusserian model of architectural ideology, I argue: that Fredric Jameson's concept of postmodernism is an ideological architectural concept; that Bernard Tschumi's "La Villette" Project in Paris, and Jacques Derrida's reading of this Project, is an example of a new, theoretical, ideological architecture; and finally, that the postmodern/deconstructivist architectural debates can only be understood in ideological terms