Avant-Garde movements in terms of Normative and Non-Normative Architecture

During the 20th Century various avant-garde movements have emerged within the context of major architecture. Normative architecture is termed as the architecture of everyday; the major architecture. This position is apolitical, territorial and conservative. The avant-garde takes the opposing position to normative architecture in that the status-quo is not what the leading edge is about. This minor architecture is political and deterritorialized. The 20th Century saw many changes on what it meant to be avant-garde. Leading up to this period of time it changed from universal civilization (18th), anti-industrial & gothic revival (19th), art for art’s sake (late 19th) and lead into the technological progress in the 20th Century. The remainder of this study will cover what the avant-garde is and what changes in thought have done to it over the modern era.

Repetition is about tradition. This is the stance of the Post-Structuralists where the thinkers proclaim that tradition can not be escaped because tradition defines what is outside of it. The avant-garde, the front and leading edge, of culture is continuously being replaced by the next. When the shift occurs, the once avant-garde position moves towards the center of the fabric of society and in time becomes part of tradition. Architecture in these terms is the same; it is always about creating its boundaries. In any period of architecture it can be said it is in one of three phases: Becoming & Changing, Current or Institutionalizing.

The avant-garde in Post-Structuralism has been compared to the Sublime. The Sublime is that sense of feeling terror but knowing you are in safety. That moment in time where the sublime occurs is the avant-garde, but after that moment it follows the same slope. Once the terror no longer dominates it has lost its power and the meaning takes on a completely new meaning to something that once held power. That conversion changes from being avant-garde to tradition.

Not all of the 20th century thinkers believed that the avant-garde was possible. Bernard Tschumi detailed a similar theory to the Sublime. He theorized that you can not both think and experience at the same time. Architecture in this view exists between the conceptual (a thing if the mind) and the perceptual (experience); the pyramid and the labyrinth. Can not be both, but it is. This dichotomy between mind and body presents a paradox. Tschumi also details an idea of architecture in terms of fireworks. “Produce a delight that cannot be sold or bought, that has no exchange value and cannot be integrated in the production cycle.” Phenomenologists argued the avant-garde as well as but as a struggle between socialism and capitalism. These theorists believed it was impossible and came up with the term arrieve-garde. The arrieve-garde was a theory that you don’t start from zero, but you also do not return to the past. They called for distance to be made from the Enlightenment and from the reactionary impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past.

“Over the past century-and-a-half avant-garde culture has assumed different roles, at times facilitating the process of modernization and thereby acting, in part, as a progressive, liberative form, at times being virulently opposed to the positivism of bourgeois culture.”


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