Toward a minor architecture /

This volume by Stoner (Univ. of California, Berkeley) is a thoroughly subversive piece of writing--from the play of its title on Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture (1927) to its extensive deployment of literature, literary criticism, philosophy, and etymology to reveal the possibilities of an architecture that arises from below. In place of the current preoccupation with a corporatized formalism--"the stale auras of commodity, originality, permanence, and perfection"--Stoner proposes a movement "toward incompleteness and immanence." This book is heavily indebted to Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986) and to Kafka's own writing, but it ranges freely across the writings of Melville, Valery, Cheever, Ballard, Borges, Woolf, Benjamin, Robbe-Grillet, and many others in search of ideas ranging from "the erasure of the outside," "spatial discontinuities," "absolute interiorities," and "words and gestures that spatialize," to "deterritorialization and reterritorialization." Brilliantly and poetically conceived and written, this book is necessary reading for prospective architects and for anyone troubled by the disjunction between the slickness of major architecture and the abject qualities of the postindustrial landscape. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-level undergraduates and above. J. Quinan University at Buffalo, SUNY

Stoner (architecture, Univ. of California, Berkeley) follows in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), who worked to overturn the policies of Robert Moses, the urban planner who reshaped mid-20th-century New York City. She critiques the empty malls and office parks characteristic of urban sprawl and examines how they emerged from four major mindsets still prevalent in architecture. The book's chaptersÅexamine each of these "mythologies": of architecture as contra to nature, of building as autonomous object, of the supreme importance of interiors, and of the culture of architect as celebrity. Stoner argues that underutilized buildings can be transformed through something she terms minor architecture, which is the art of reoccupying them, e.g., the current artistic reclamation of abandoned buildings in Detroit. This bookÅreimagines architecture as a kind of literature, and Stoner is heavily indebted to the writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Felix Guattari (coauthors, Anti-Oedipus), whose theories of minor literatures she used to shape her own ideas. VERDICT Recommended for all readers interested in architecture-this should be required reading in every design school.-Peter S. Kaufman, formerly with Boston Architectural Coll. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.