The book The Architecture of Failure (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012) written by Douglas Murphy is a reading of architecture history from Crystal Palace (1851) to our contemporary ‘parametricism’ through a very corrosive filter as the title could suggest. However, what this same title fails to describe is what is being really criticized by D.Murphy between his lines, not so much the architecture that creates a new paradigm by its very existence and narrative, but rather the movement that emerges consecutively to the birth of this new model. The first part of the book is dedicated to the second part of the 19th century’s reign of iron and glass engaged in a technological progressism along the various spectacular World Exhibitions hosted in Europe. He then skip the first part of the 20th century, probably acknowledging the multitude of discourses critical of modernism already existing, and write our contemporary architectural history starting from the 1960s and what he calls ‘solutionism’.
Although critical of the manifesto architecture that the Pompidou Center embodied, he is more waspish towards the movement that followed its creation including one of its architect, Richard Rogers, and his alter-ego, Norman Foster as their own self-caricature that offered a new architectural embodiment for capitalism when it was originally though in opposition of it:
Few more pictures of K.Wacshsmann work about structure network that show his amazing skillz to create beautiful structure jonction, I discovered that six month ago thanks to Ed Keller. Wacshsmann as bucky Fuller was comissioned by the US Air Force (plane hangar) to develop some of those structures.
