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Andrew Toland, ‘Dirtying the Real: Liane Lefaivre and the Architectural Stalemate with Emerging Realities’, Chapter 8 in The Figure of Knowledge: Conditioning Architectural Theory, 1960s–1990s, edited by Sebastiaan Loosen, Rajesh Heynickx, and Hilde Heynen (Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2020), pp. 181–194.
Abstract:
This chapter gives an account of the notion of ‘dirty realism in architecture’, first proposed in 1989 by Liane Lefaivre, who wrote a number of articles and edited a special issue of Archithese on this theme in the early 1990s. Although largely overlooked within subsequent architectural discourse, it was also briefly picked up by influential figures like Frederic Jameson, Stan Allen and Josep Lluís Mateo. Lefaivre’s use of the phrase sought to characterise a range of similar practices by architectural practitioners in the late 1980s responding to urban conditions of that period. The chapter argues that ‘dirty realism’ in architecture should be interpreted as part of a more widespread attempt to respond to the shifting context of design practice that extends back to discourses on ‘architectural realism’ in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and forward into more recent discussions of architectural pragmatism, the post-critical, and ‘the real’ in the context of a globalising discipline. Focussing on Lefaivre’s claim within this genealogical progression also helps us gain an insight into various stages in the shifts in representations of the ‘urban’ as a key concern of architectural publications and architectural theory; Lefaivre clearly attempts to articulate a transition from architecturally historicist/modernist/ postmodernist contests over the city to an attitude that is ‘harsher’ and that continues to have echoes in many current representations of the ‘realities’ global urbanisation within architectural culture. Further, scrutinising Lefaivre’s formulation of ‘dirty realism in architecture’ in these contexts, as well as its afterlife, helps us to re-approach certain key influential touchstones of the past twenty years of architectural discourse, from Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL to the rise of landscape urbanism – drawing attention to the manner in which realism discourses structure relationships between discipline-specific theories and constructions of ‘the world outside’.